


Reunion and Eruption

by Regularity



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997), Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: AU in which Cloud dies, Aerti, After Sector 5 Reactor, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Donna Lockhart, F/F, Femslash, Some Anticipated Non-Con But No Actual Non-Con
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:46:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 62,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24651034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Regularity/pseuds/Regularity
Summary: What happens to Aerith, Tifa, and Avalanche if Cloud doesn't live through the fall from the Sector 5 Reactor? How does Aerith meet up with the others? What happens to Tifa on her Corneo mission?Attempts to follow canon story events with alternate universe revisions in the wake of Cloud's death. Also Tifa and Aerith will eventually fall in love.**Archive Warnings and Characters/Tags will evolve as chapters post, and if any new Archive Warnings apply as time goes on, I'll note it at the beginning of the chapter.**
Relationships: Aerith Gainsborough/Tifa Lockhart
Comments: 54
Kudos: 137





	1. Metal Sky With A Chance of Cloud

Aerith Gainsborough shelters from the explosion that rips across the metal sky. Debris rains down all around Sector 5, and she can only hope she’ll be safe here in her church. Her church with her precious flowers.

She shelters in the back of the building, and keeps her head down, listening, waiting for the moment that something destroys this place, kills her. She screams as something does indeed slam into the roof, cracking it open. The debris falls through, ripping apart ceiling beams and crashing to the floor of the main hall. Aerith can’t do anything but wait.

Until the debris stops falling. Until the screams from all over the Sector dwindle away. Until the flames in the sky die.

Slowly, she picks herself up, shaking off the rubble and dust. “Please not the flowers, please not the flowers…” 

She cracks open the door, and gasps. The dust still settles out here, but she can clearly see in the beam of light, proper sunlight, that shines through here. A man, and not just any man, but the one from the other night up on the plate. The one who protected her from the shadow things and refused to take a free flower like some kind of jerk. That big sword sits amid the rubble. And that armor, so familiar. A flash of black hair crosses her memory, but this is clearly not Zack. For one thing, he’s too pretty. Even in death, this man’s features are breathtaking.

He lies there, unmoving, amid the white blossoms of her precious flowers. The floor has cratered from his impact. It’s less gruesome than she might have expected, from a fall that high.

She creeps forward, hesitant to just rush out in case something from the roof falls, and urges him to wake up. “Don’t be dead, sword boy,” she whispers.

When he doesn’t move, she steps into the flower bed, careful not to crush any more of her little lovely plants, and checks his pulse. Nothing. She sighs. What a strange coincidence, that she should be where his body ends up. That he should remind her so much of Zack. And yet nothing can be done. Dead is dead. Already his spirit must have rejoined the planet. She prays over the corpse, wishing him a speedy retreat from this life.

His eyes are open, unseeing. He’s got the same brilliant aquamarine irises. Not Zack, but a SOLDIER all the same. She huffs and tries to lift him out of the flowers, but he’s too big. She could drag him, maybe, but that would kill more of her flowers. 

So she searches his pockets, regretful to be looting the dead, but she hopes to find something, anything that will help identify him. He’s carrying an assortment of curatives, medicines, and materia, and she guiltily takes the satchel containing it all. He won’t be needing them, and she can use or sell them. Some of this medicine is expensive. Some of this materia is rare. It can be used or sold to great effect.

In another pocket she discovers a tiny napkin, like a cocktail napkin, with a logo on it that she can’t quite make out in this light. It’s soaked through with blood, and all she can make out is garbled letters and “--th H--ven”. As she stares at it longer, careful not to get the blood on her, she thinks the symbol in front of the “th” is a seven. Seventh Heaven? She’s never been, but she’s heard stories about a bar in Sector 7 going by that name. Is that where this SOLDIER spent his time before his death?

The large double doors of the church burst wide open suddenly, and Aerith stuffs the napkin into the satchel as she stands up with it around her shoulder. She expects maybe one of the Sector 5 kids to be at the door, checking on her. They’re so sweet how they all treat her like the big sister none of them have, but they put themselves in so much danger running about alone.

Only it’s not one of the orphans. It’s not anyone she recognizes, but she knows the type. This is one of Tseng’s flunkies. A sharp black suit with a deep plunging “V” neckline, showcasing his pecs. He’s pretty in a cocky way, with bright red hair and a grin that says anything can be funny if you laugh hard enough. She instantly dislikes him, though. It’s been a while since the Turks came after her.

And he comes with backup. Several Shinra soldiers filter in behind him, guns pointed at the floor, but all stand ready.

“Damn,” the Turk says, “And here I was hoping maybe that debris would’ve knocked you out or something. Make my job easy.”

She realizes she’s standing in front of the dead man, and this Turk hasn’t spotted him yet. 

She says, “I must not be important enough for the boss these days. Do you have a name, underling?”

He scoffs, thumping a wicked-looking baton on his shoulders. “Reno, you jumped-up slum ditch. I hear you’re good at giving my pal the slip. Bald guy, likes his sunglasses.”

Rude. She smiles as she steps to the side, revealing the body behind her. “I’ve met him. He’s nicer than you, Reno.”

He shrugs. “I don’t get paid for nice. You two, grab her.” He points at two of the soldiers, then does a double take at the flowers. “Is that a fuckin’ body?”

“It’s not fertilizer,” Aerith says, taking small steps backwards. She has no idea how she’s going to get out of this. She let herself be distracted by the sky falling. She’s usually better about slipping around unseen.

“Well, shit, it might be now. You a killer, girlie?”

“I kill germs, does that count?”

“No…” Reno says, trailing off. “This dude fell from the explosion up top? Damn, look at him. He should be a pile of guts and jagged bones.”

“Sir, she’s retreating,” one of the soldiers says.

“Yeah, yeah, go get her. Boss said nothing gross, so don’t get all handsy or I’ll break them the fuck off, you got it?”

“Such a charmer,” Aerith says, turning to run. Before she can take two steps, something thumps into her back, and all sense of place is lost to her. Sharp pain, shock, and she drops to the ground, twitching. She can barely breathe. Above her is Reno, grinning with his shock baton sparking at the place she just fell. So fast. She never stood a chance getting away from this jerk.

He says, “Bag her while I check this dude out. Something’s up with him. At any rate, if he fell from the reactor explosion, I’m sure the top dogs’ll want to identify him.”

Aerith struggles to breathe, to shuffle away, but her body won’t listen. One of the soldiers comes forward with handcuffs and a bag to throw over her head, and she tries her best to kick out or do anything at all. Even tries to blindly activate her special materia, hidden in her hair-bow. If it were ever going to do anything, now’s the time!

But of course nothing does. It’s just worthless, glowing white. Like a nightlight. Comforting and the only thing she has left of her real mother, but useless.

As the soldier reaches down to cuff her, the shadows swarm in, knocking him back, confusing everyone, and suddenly Aerith is dragged away on the black mists of these creatures. She manages a surprised sound as she slides through the door to the back of the church, watching the soldiers panic at invisible forces. The door slams shut, and the shadows release her. She gathers herself up, coughing and struggling to recover from the disabling shock. Had these things really just helped her? They’ve always been a nuisance when they showed up before. 

She has no time to worry about it. She grabs her staff from the banister, settles the satchel with all the dead man’s belongings back into a comfortable position, and looks for an exit. The only way out is up, as the church butts up against mounds of old wreckage. Maybe if she’s lucky, the hole the man made in the roof will be accessible and she can get out that way.

So she climbs the steps, brushing past old furniture, looking for ways to get up to the roof. She spots the ladder that leads up to the rafters, but it’s on the other side of this back room, with mountains of furniture and broken floors in her path.

She screws up her courage and starts climbing over furniture, making her way slowly up the steps to the second floor. As she’s transitioning from one cabinet to a desk, the door begins banging loudly, startling her. She nearly falls backwards, but the shadow things push her back, like being lifted on a cushion of air. She has no idea what to make of these things, but she’s not about to argue when the Turks have finally started taking her acquisition seriously.

It’s hard out here for a poor Cetran girl.

She keeps climbing, clambering over the piled up furniture until she reaches the third floor, but now there’s a long broken section of floor with a flimsy board connecting both sides. She’s never been super confident about crossing these questionable gaps, but no time like running for her life to get used to it. She still feels a little shaky from being electrocuted, but she thinks she can do this.

The board creaks ominously as her full weight rests upon it, but it holds, and she creeps forward, concentrating on not looking down, on not settling her entire weight on a single foot, especially as she reaches the center of the board, its structurally weakest part.

The door below finally crashes open, and two Shinra soldiers stumble through, followed by an angry Reno and the rest. She nearly loses her balance in surprise, stumbles forward, hears the board crack under her.

The soldiers raise their guns, firing warning shots well clear of her body, but the shots spang off wood and rusted metal, scaring her even more. She’s never been shot at before! And as terrifying as it is, it also makes her angry. She leaps forward, clearing the last few feet, and ducks down to avoid their gunfire.

The board splinters under her jump, but doesn’t crack through completely. So she slams it with her staff, where it snaps in two, falls downwards onto the massive pile of furniture that other Shinra soldiers are already clambering over and tossing out of the way.

One half of the board strikes a soldier, and he topples backwards in surprise, grabbing for the bookshelf he is climbing over. His weight pulls the shelf with him, and they fall backwards together directly into Reno, who was waiting impatiently at the bottom of the steps. 

Aerith doesn’t have time to check what happened to them. She sprints for the ladder and climbs. The wood rots and threatens to break as she goes, and she brings her heels down on each successive rung, shattering the wood as she climbs.

She makes it to the top of the church, the attic and the rafters, and it’s almost peaceful up here. She spots a path to the hole the man made when he fell from the metal sky, and creeps over to it, listening for sounds of climbing, of the soldiers and Reno.

But as she reaches the rafters, where she’ll have to walk along narrow beams over the front of the church, she hesitates. There’s nowhere to hide if they come out and look for her. Nowhere to run but out the big hole. They’d be able to follow her easily, track her progress.

But then Reno shouts down below, being helped out of the back room with some injuries from the collapsing furniture. Serves him right, the jackass.

“To hell with this shit. Let Rude find the bitch.” Ugh. Rude is nicer than Reno, no question, but he is also something of a creeper. She thinks it’s that way he appraises people by lowering his shades just enough that you can see his eyes. Unnerving.

She decides to wait them out, as they stumble their way out of the church. On the way past the flowers, Reno hesitates. “Hold up. Grab the body. The big boss is gonna want to know why a SOLDIER is fighting against Shinra.”

“SOLDIER, sir?” one of the normal guards asks.

“Yeah, you know, the real guys. All caps, not you shitheels.”

“Y-yes, sir.” He points at his underlings. “You two, gather up the body.”

They move forward, and Aerith can’t see them very well, but she knows they’re about to trample her flowers. She can’t do anything about it, though.

Then Reno says, “Hey, watch the flowers.”

They do, delicately lifting the body and trampling only a few more flowers as they carry the young man out. Aerith has a moment of regret. He might be a big jerk, but at least he respects beauty. It takes a little time for them to filter out and head away, and she sighs with relief once they’re gone. Well, most of them. A couple stay behind to monitor the church. And Reno mentioned Rude... She’ll have to be careful on her way home.

Now if she can just figure out how to get down from here safely, everything will be fine.

She stands up tall and crawls out of the hole in the roof, wondering just what she’ll find when she makes her way to Sector 7. Outside, the sun lamps flicker occasionally, but manage to stay on despite the increased load on the other reactors. That’s two gone… the planet must surely be happy about that.

She takes a deep breath, opens her eyes, and nods to herself. She can do this. Her heart races as she climbs and hops her way across the rooftops. Sometimes she has to leap over a little gap, and each time her pulse thumps. Every time she kicks rubble inadvertently and it drops to the ground below, she stares at it like it could have been her.

She has a moment to think that this pathway over the junk of the slums is a little too useful, and that makes her wary. Bandits and thugs often use out of the way places as hideouts, but she hasn’t seen any evidence of them yet. Just as well. She’s very good at evading them on the ground; she knows all the little secret paths and hidden entrances all throughout the slums. Sometimes because she finds them herself, sometimes because the kids at the orphanage show them to her. And sometimes--like now, when she’s in trouble--she gets a feeling. And that feeling shows her a safer path. She’s learned to trust those feelings.

She spies a path up ahead that will take her up higher, and let her get a better sense of how she can progress forward. It leads up to an old water tower or something, and she carefully navigates to it. The ladder is metal, and rusted, but she pulls on it a bit to test it, and it holds well enough.

So she begins to climb. On the second to last rung before the top, the ladder shears loose of the tower, and begins to fall forward. She panics and leaps up for the lip of the tower, barely grabs hold of it. And dangles. The ladder bangs against the center of the tower and rests there, mere feet from her reach, but worthless in this state. She’s used to crawling around and running, but hasn’t really had occasion to do this kind of physical exercise. Her arms burn while she hangs off the edge of this thing. She can drop back down and likely not hurt herself too much, but this was the only way she saw forward, and she was following her instinct. It’s gotta be the way forward.

So she grits her teeth, locks one arm, and pulls her staff free from her back with the other. She’s got maybe one chance. Aerith strains forward, reaching the metal staff out to the ladder. Loops it inside the rung and pulls, trying to raise it back up enough that she can get her legs on it, rest her arms.

It comes slowly, and more rust flakes away as she brings it closer. Her fingers begin to slip on the top of this structure as her arm almost vibrates with the strain of holding herself up. She gets one foot on the ladder, tucks it in and pulls it up next to her body. She can’t rest all her weight on it without it falling forward, or worse, back, but she clutches the staff to her chest, between it and the ladder, and switches her arms, letting the left one rest for a moment while she holds the ladder in place, deciding what to do next.

She tries to put weight down on the ladder, use it to climb while still holding the lip above her. If she can get another foot higher, she might be able to get her elbow above the line, and then drag herself up sideways. But any attempt to hold the ladder in place just wobbles her, putting new stress on her arm and threatening to lose her tenuous grasp of the top of the structure, her staff, and the ladder.

The staff slides loose and begins to fall, and she narrowly grips it as it bounces off a rung. And this gives her the idea of how to get up.

She pulls the staff higher, swings the ladder outwards a tiny bit, and wedges the metal staff in between rungs. Then she loops the top part through the vertical railing very near to her hand on the lip of this tower, and leans her weight forward, using the staff as leverage to hold the ladder steady. The ladder creaks, her staff groans against the strain, but the whole assembly holds.

Enough to climb another couple of rungs without it slipping out from under her. She sweats and gets her arms up, uses the railing to continue climbing, and drops to the roof of this tower, panting and laughing. She manages to free her staff from its position, noting that it’s actually a little bent along the middle now, but better that than breaking her skull open on the ground. With the staff free, the ladder falls loose, clanging to the ground amid rust and dust, and then silence reigns once more.

Eventually she sits up, and stands. She wipes the sweat away, and gasps at the view afforded her. She’s grimy, covered in rust, dust, some of her blood where she’s scraped herself, and her favorite dress has a few choice rips, but she’s alive, and she can see the wall to Sector 7 from here. And everything in between: all the mounds of rust and waste, all the small smokes from stoves and engines releasing their smogs into the undercity. She doesn’t know why, but she loves this place. With all its dents, and rust, and monsters both human and otherwise lurking about. It’s her home, and a view like this reminds her that it’s vast, and filled with people all just trying to get by. 

She tears her eyes from the view and glances around, trying to find a place to progress or drop down, and thinks she sees a large tube farther ahead that might get her closer to the ground. So she circles the tower, climbs down and over several more connected walkways, and clambers over a metal girder that bridges a large gap. If she were with the orphans, for whatever reason, she’d pretend to lose her balance. Little jokes. But she’s alone, and she sighs as she gets to the other side. This is where the large tube is, some metal pipe that is mostly intact. She can’t quite see where it lets out, but there’s enough scuff marks on the base of it that she knows people have used it for traversal.

So she holds her staff close and sits down in the chute, shuffles forward until gravity takes over, and momentum carries her down. Wind whips past her face, ruffling her hair and her dress, and she yells out with glee as the slide deposits her… somewhere else. This is the closest she’s gotten to the ground so far, and she thinks she can climb down the side of the building, let herself drop the last five or six feet.

But it looks much higher from where she stands right now, and it takes her a moment to gather her courage. She glances both ways down the path between the church and Sector 5’s slums, her home, making sure no one’s around, especially the Turks or Shinra. She drops the staff and the satchel with the man’s belongings, then levers one leg over the edge of the roof. Then the other, and tries to lower herself down gently. But her arms are still tired from the exertion earlier, and her left arm locks up, losing its grip, and she slips free of the roof. 

Her arms and legs splay out, searching for purchase, finding none. For the briefest moment she panics, wondering who would find her, skull cracked or ankle broken, and what they would do to her.

Then she drops into a crouch, protecting her head, and lands hard on some sheet metal, which twangs loudly against her impact.

Pain shoots through her shoulder, her hip, and she loses feeling in that side of her body before she comes to rest. She cries out in pain, can’t help it, and then stifles it just as quickly. This is the no man’s land between points of civilization, and she needs to draw less attention to herself now that she’s on the ground again. 

But the pain is vast, and she doesn’t know if she’s broken anything. But she can breathe, and she doesn’t seem to be bleeding. She feels around for breaks or bone piercing through the skin. She hurts, but nothing feels dangerously broken or busted.

Still, this is hardly ideal, and she gathers up the satchel and her staff, groaning from exertion and still working feeling back into her arm. With her other hand she feels around for the materia she saw earlier. It’s bright green, almost cheerful, and she knows that green materia can be curative. Heal minor wounds and revitalize an exhausted person, keep them conscious when their wounds would otherwise knock them out.

But she doesn’t know which is which, and she holds one of the green orbs, feeling it almost vibrate with energy, and concentrates on it to activate it. A tiny bolt of lightning sparks out, zapping against the rusty building next to her. She lets out a tiny yelp of surprise and puts that one back. Definitely not the one she wants.

There’s only a few green ones in the mix, so she grabs another, and concentrates on it, trying to determine if there’s some way to _feel_ what it does. This one radiates warmth and almost pulses with energy, rather than vibrating. She puts that one back, grabs another. This materia is cool to the touch, hums with energy, and just holding it makes her shiver.

She grabs the last green materia, and this one feels totally different from the others. It matches her heartbeat with its vibrational energy, and where it touches her scuffed palms, she feels soothing energy bleed into her. This is the one. She activates it, and a wave of bluish-green energy washes over her, lifestream energy folded into its true purpose. To regenerate. To heal.

Her little hurts and cuts scab over immediately, and all the aches and pains vanish as if they had never existed. She feels… revitalized, and yet also like she’s drained. Channeling materia is just as taxing as swinging a weapon, as running a race. 

Interesting. She’s always known how materia works, and has had her share of small experiences over the years, but to actively use this green variety is something altogether different. She drops the materia back into the satchel with the others, thanking the nameless stranger for this unintentional gift. Now if only she could figure out what her little white orb of materia was good for.

She glances out of the tiny alcove she’s in, makes sure there’s no one else, and hurries on her way to the Sector 5 train station. Here she avoids the Turks again, who are scouting around in a helicopter. She spies Reno once as he accepts help into the copter, and the other one she knows, Rude, steps out, cleaning his sunglasses before putting them back on. As if he needs shades in the slums. 

Aerith takes another path she knows, through construction zones and around the main thoroughfare. The danger here is creatures, twisted by pollution and mako. They gather wherever people aren’t, and when they get brave enough, or hungry enough, they go where people are.

So she holds her staff in one hand, and the sparkly materia that she now knows can shoot lightning in the other. She’s fought creatures off before, but it’ll be nice to have an extra weapon for the journey.

And she has to use it before the afternoon is done. Large rats swarm her first, and she uses the materia against them, but all it does is stun them a little, scorching their fur and sending them scurrying for safety and more numbers.

So she finds the warm materia, and the next time they come at her, she lashes out with a tiny ball of flame on the leader, a larger rat they call doom rats, and the flames boil over it. Its scream is horrible, but it dies quickly. Not painlessly. But at least it didn’t suffer.

Other creatures attack on this path, but between her knowledge of the slums, her staff, and the new combat materia she’s stumbled into, she makes short work of them all. By the time she finally reaches the other side of the construction zone, she’s feeling pleasantly exhausted. Using materia takes a bit out of you, but it sure beats swinging a staff like a golf club or baseball bat all day.

She reaches the outskirts of Sector 5, and immediately is pulled in various directions by friendly faces. Some just want to say hi, some ask if she’s okay given her bedraggled appearance. A couple of the kids from the orphanage want to talk about the crazy news, and drag her over to the large television in the center of town. On the TV is a news report up on the plate, outside of the Sector 5 Reactor. A severe and attractive woman threatens the reporter and cameraperson, while at the same time assuaging fears about the terrorist attacks. The former kind of ruins the sentiment of the latter, but it cuts off before anything real happens.

Aerith lets herself be pulled along by the kids, chattering about the explosion, and what they did or didn’t see. They eventually make it to the Leaf House, the orphanage for Sector 5, and she is distracted by it all. The Turks know where she lives, have for a very long time, but now that Reno is around and it seems like they are going to be more aggressive about getting her to comply, she isn’t sure what to do about it. 

If they come for Elmyra, Aerith doesn’t know what she’ll do. The Turks have never been this way before. She excuses herself from the Leaf House, and carefully makes her way home down the littered, covered path that leads to her garden. She’s wary of the Turks, or increased Shinra presence, but nothing happens that strikes her as worrisome, and she comes into the glade, glad to be free of the normal smells of the slums. Earthy, floral scents envelop her, and she hears the feelings of the plants all around her. Flowers, carrots, roses, catstalks. Every one a unique voice, so soft, so delicate, all susurration and whisper.

This is her home, her sanctuary. She loves it here, and spreads the wealth of her sanctum to everyone she comes in contact with in the slums. Besides the church, this is the only place in the entire slums where anything substantial will grow. She knows she has something to do with that, as a Cetran, but the knowledge of how and why is lost to her. The plants speak to her, but she sometimes has trouble talking back.

A sudden feeling of being watched comes over Aerith, and she spins in place back toward the path that leads to her home. Rude stands there, arms crossed, eyes hidden behind his shades, light glinting off the bald head. 

“You treated my partner awfully bad,” he says, taking measured steps down the stairs on the path. Aerith grips the cold materia, not sure what she should do here. She doesn’t want to hurt her plants, but neither can she let this man come in here to her home and do whatever he wants.

She takes a step forward, away from the house. “He wasn’t as nice as you.”

“I fear my name is going to be indicative of my personality going forward,” Rude says, grinning.

She scoffs, gripping the materia tighter behind her back.

“I’m not coming with you. And if you try to hurt my mother, you’ll find out just how cross a flower girl can be.”

“Shaking in my loafers,” Rude says. He stops at the tiny bridge over the creek, and Aerith stops on the other side of it. Rude isn’t as fast as Reno was, but he’s no slouch either. She isn’t sure she can use this materia on him fast enough if he rushes her from this close distance.

“So what’s your move, Rude? Are you going to kidnap a helpless girl, use her mother as leverage, burn down my home?”

“I won’t have to do any of those if you’d just agree to meet with the boss.”

She says, “The last time I saw Tseng, he said he didn’t want to force it.”

Rude grins. “Sorry, I mean the real boss. Rufus Shinra.”

Aerith’s attitude changes. So that’s what this is. Someone new is in charge. “I thought the Vice President was away on diplomatic missions to Wutai.” She’s pretty sure that’s what the news reports say about the young VP.

Rude shrugs. “Above my pay grade. Do you want to come nice and easy, or are you gonna hit me with your fancy stick?”

“I was thinking about sticking it somewhere,” she suggests, eyes rolling up innocently.

“Cute. You may have gotten lucky with Reno, but there’s no furniture to throw at me out here.”

She’s about to say something pithy in response, but he rushes forward in the space of a breath, and she’s so surprised that she falls backwards trying to avoid his outstretched hand. Yet the gloved hand snatches the strap on the dead man’s satchel, and she yanks to a stop inches from the ground, held aloft by the strap. Rude leers over her, casting a shadow over her body.

And grins. “Now’s a good time to give--” 

Aerith holds the materia up between them, activating it blindly. Rude receives the full impact of a sparkling ball of ice in his chest, which almost immediately shatters, knocking him up and away, shredding his very nice suit jacket and splashing red droplets of blood all over her.

Aerith drops down when Rude loses his hold on the satchel’s strap, and moments later Rude drops about ten feet away, landing in a crouched, kneeling position, coughing blood and pulling his broken shades off his face.

“No one said you had materia,” he complains, standing and pulling a second pair of sunglasses out of his breast pocket. These are also broken from the impact of the ice materia, and he tosses them aside glumly.

Aerith scrambles to her feet, wiping at the blood on her face, no doubt rubbing it in like warpaint. “You got a new boss, I got a new weapon.”

He rotates his neck and cracks his knuckles, smiling. “And here I thought you were going to be boring.”

“You can leave any time, Rude. I won’t tell your boss you got beat by ice.”

“This fight is long from over, Miss Gainsborough.” The door to Aerith’s house bursts open, and her adoptive mother, Elmyra, holds a rolling pin in one hand, and a frying pan in the other. 

“Everything all right out here, Aerith?” she calls, eyes on Rude.

“Just the Turks delivering a message. I’ve got it under control, Mom.”

“One cheap move does not equal control of a situation, girl.” Rude squares his shoulders before taking a defensive stance, and Aerith holds the materia out to him again. She concentrates on hitting him with another ball of ice, but when it appears at his chest, his stance shifts subtly. He uses the ball of ice as leverage to shove himself away from it, letting his shoes slide over the dirt path. The ice shatters outward, sending crystalline spikes in every direction, but he dances away unharmed. Aerith huffs in annoyance, wondering if the one that shoots lightning will work better against a guy who can block that.

But as she shuffles for the different materia, Elmyra coming forward to protect her, Rude pauses, putting his hand to his ear. He listens for a moment while Aerith holds the lightning materia out, ready to strike him with it, but he whispers something she can’t hear, and drops his stance.

“Giving up?” she asks.

“Stick a pin in this, Miss Gainsborough. I’m being recalled for bigger and better things. You’ll see us again before too long, though.”

He pats at his other pockets, and pulls a third pair of shades from one of them, sliding them onto his slightly bloody face. He grins, waves casually, and jogs off.

Aerith heaves a sigh of relief, letting the lightning materia fall back into the satchel, where it bonks against the others. Elmyra puts an arm around her, hugging her close.

“I guess we knew this day would come eventually, didn’t we?” Elmyra asks.

“The day they finally get pushy, yeah.” Aerith leans her head into her mother’s shoulder, and they watch as Rude disappears around a corner. “I already got away from the new guy earlier. Red hair, far too pretty for his own good.”

“You do like the pretty ones.”

Aerith blushes slightly. “Not my fault.”

Elmyra laughs. Her laugh has always brought Aerith such warmth, and it does so now. “Well, it’s certainly not mine. You spend too much time with beautiful things not to appreciate it wherever you see it.”

Aerith doesn’t have a response to that, but she sighs. “Today was a day, as you can tell. I don’t think I can stay home.”

Elmyra shakes her head in agreement. “No, I suppose not. If the Turks are finally coming for you in force, you’ll need to stay hidden.”

“I have a place I might be able to go,” she says, thinking about that bloody cocktail napkin from the dead man’s pocket. “I--I guess I shouldn’t tell you about it, huh? In case the Turks decide to interrogate you.”

“Best not,” Elmyra says, frowning. “Who knows what they’re truly capable of. Come inside, dear. Whatever called that one away, I imagine you’ve got some time.”

Aerith nods, and lets her mother lead her into their home. She glances at her gardens, her sanctum, wondering when next she might be able to see them, to walk among the whispering plants, to hear their joys and sorrows.

But first thing tomorrow, she’s going to sneak out to the Sector 7 Slums, looking for the trail of a dead man. A dead man carrying a sword and wearing armor too familiar to her. To maybe find out what happened to her first love.


	2. Miss Tifa's Dangerous Mission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tifa Lockhart goes on a mission to Don Corneo's. Aerith finds her way to the Sector 7 Slums alone.

The sun lamps in Sector 7 flicker. They’ve been doing that more often of late, even moreso because they just destroyed a second reactor. Tifa Lockhart watches them from her posh chocobo carriage. She smooths her exotic dress, something she would never have believed she would wear, and it isn’t precisely what Cloud told her she should get, but the whole point of a fancy dress-up date is to be someone else. Right? But she also had it altered to be much shorter, in case she needs to fight. The black kimono is too much, but maybe too much will be enough for Corneo.

The inside of the carriage smells nice, perfumed, but it can’t fully mask the closed-in damp that is the entirety of the slums beneath Midgar’s plate. The sun lamps flicker again, and they stay off for several seconds before coming back on again.

Her fingers brush the bright yellow flower in her hair. The flower Cloud gave her and had no idea what it meant. She tries not to think about Cloud. Not exactly her friend when they were growing up, but they had stupidly made that promise to each other. If she needed his help, he’d come. No questions asked.

Well, he did. And now he was probably dead. Tifa looks away from the metal sky, concentrating on her breathing. The mission has to go on. Avalanche knows Corneo is looking into them, but not why. The only real intel they could gather on Don Corneo is that he controls Wall Market and has a fondness for busty young women. Well, Tifa isn’t sure she fits that narrative, but the way that Wedge and Biggs stared agog at her in this getup was reassuring, if mortifying. 

Chocobo Sam, a charming older man with a gruff accent that doesn’t fit anywhere Tifa’s been, clears his throat from up front. “We’re comin’ up on the wall, Miss Tifa.”

She tries to be cool and assertive. “Thank you, Sam. How long to Wall Market?”

“Depends how long it takes to get the door open.”

“I’m sure it will be fine. I’m told the Don has connections.”

Chocobo Sam grunts laughter. “That’s putting it mildly. You just keep that attitude as perky as your other attributes and you’ll be fine.”

Tifa can’t see the man’s face while he sits facing away from her, and she’s glad for that because she can’t hide the sudden blush at that impropriety. She needs to get used to being talked about like this, if she’s going to get in to see the Don.

Money changes hands, and the Shinra soldiers open up the gigantic gate well in advance of the daily schedule. Why they thought it necessary to control who comes and goes between some sectors of the slums, Tifa doesn’t know, but seeing corrupt Shinra soldiers doesn’t surprise her. She knows there are many just trying to do their best, to provide for themselves and their families. Who don’t understand all the things Shinra does wrong.

She also knows that the corruption starts at the top and runs downhill. Like an Avalanche. After their run-in with Heidegger of Shinra, gloating about using them to make a point, she knows there’s no stopping this without bloodshed. She doesn’t have to like it, though.

As the gate slides open, Tifa has a moment where she’s sure Cloud is on the other side. That he’s going to be banged up but somehow survived that insane fall from the catwalks outside the Sector 5 Reactor. It would be just like him. Standing there, kicking dirt, hand on that ridiculous sword trying to figure out how to get past the gate.

Wishful thinking.

It doesn’t stop her looking around as the carriage passes through the gate. There’s an abandoned playground here, way nicer than what they have in the Sector 7 slums. But no Cloud. No SOLDIER 1st Class, with those haunting teal eyes that never look quite at you when you want them to. Instead there’s just a lonely young woman sitting atop the slide in the playground, eating a simple lunch. She’s hard to make out at this distance, but pretty. Long brown hair, a cute little red jacket. Almost seeming out of place, like she doesn’t belong in the slums at all. Like she doesn’t belong in this dreary world. 

The woman sees Tifa, grins, and waves politely. Like an old friend. Tifa blushes at being caught watching the woman, and waves back. They share a moment, strangers connected by transfer between the wall. The woman hops off the slide and jogs toward the open gate while Tifa loses sight of her around a corner. For just a moment, Tifa thinks there is something familiar about her.

The satchel. Cloud carried one like it. And were those yellow flowers peeking out of the bag? Yellow and cheerful, like the one Cloud gave her after the first reactor mission, in her hair at this moment.

She shakes her head. Wishful thinking again.

She rides on to Wall Market, trying not to fidget with her outfit. Trying not to worry about the bar. About Avalanche. This is such a risky maneuver, but the crew believes in her. She just wishes she had their faith. Though she’s wearing the fanciest dress she’s ever seen up close, and her hair and makeup are something out of those bougey salons above the plate, she can’t help but realize that this is her projection. She doesn’t know what it’s like up there, not really.

Where she sees a fantastically expensive dress and expertly-layered makeup, someone from the rich areas above the plate can probably see the forgery. They know she wouldn’t belong. Will Don Corneo be similar? Will she be enough to entice him, to get him into a room alone and extract answers from him?

She doesn’t know, but time has run out. The carriage comes to a stop, and Chocobo Sam hops off, opening the back gate for her to climb down. He extends a hand to her, which she almost doesn’t take out of a desire to prove she doesn’t need the help. Then she remembers she’s supposed to be shy and demure, and accepts the hand. The mission is the mission, and she’s got to follow through.

The sounds of Wall Market are near. Tinny music, loud voices. A babble that devolves into incomprehensible white noise. Bass bumps from clubs and bars. People drink openly on the narrow streets and warrens. Street toughs protect alleyways. Harsh neon glare forces a squint.

A couple of men approach, and Sam smiles at the two of them. “Good to see you, Kotch, Scotch. Staying out of trouble?” Those don’t even sound like names, but Tifa averts her gaze. Jessie’s lessons on how to be pliant and shy sound an awful lot like how Tifa just acts in general, but she focuses on amplifying those effects. Smile shyly, don’t keep eye contact. Giggle at anything even remotely resembling a joke. If these men are with Don Corneo, she needs the act to be on point starting now.

The darker-skinned man with the bleached blonde mohawk grins. “You know us. Trouble is at least one of our middle names. This the girl?” He walks up to Tifa, casually grabs her chin, lifts her face up and starts examining it. His breath is hot on her cheek and smells of stale beer. She does her best not to kick in this guy’s chest out of disgust.

“This here’s Miss Tifa. Careful how you treat her. She’s a looker, but I think she’s feisty.”

Damn. That’s not what she wants them thinking.

“I got a cat feistier than this,” the other man says. He’s wearing dark shades and has his hair slicked back. “Come on, let’s get  _ Miss Tifa _ up to her private suite.”

“Aw, c’mon Scotch,” the first man, apparently Kotch, says. “I know you had your heart set on more than one lady tonight, but we’ve got the Corneo Cup to look forward to. You know the ladies love a grandstander.”

“Yeah, yeah. Gonna end up at the Honeybee Inn again.”

Chocobo Sam tips his hat to Tifa. “These gentlemen will escort you up to the Don’s place. It’s been a pleasure being your escort, Miss Tifa.” He takes her hand and kisses it like a proper gentleman, and Tifa blushes a little. Then she remembers that this man, as charming and nice as he seems, is escorting women into a criminal’s hands and thinks nothing of it.

So she thanks him politely and follows Kotch and Scotch through the Wall Market. They chatter and laugh with locals as they go, and Tifa receives a few appreciative catcalls as well as many sad looks and furtive glances. Tifa begins to have a bad feeling about being the Don’s lady for the evening, but she can handle herself. If she can get him alone, she can subdue him no matter how big and strong he is. Especially if he tries to get her to do anything with little Don. No faster way to stop a man in his tracks than to apply a little pressure. She wishes she didn’t know this, but the slums, even the relatively nice Sector 7 slums where people take care of each other, has its bad element. 

You don’t run a bar without kneeing a few jerks in their bars, in her experience.

They pass through the Wall Market and up an elaborate set of stairs leading to the gaudiest, most foreign place she’s ever seen. She knows vaguely what Wutai-inspired architecture looks like because of movies and wartime footage, but this is gauche and impractical. It’s red and gold, and opulent, and the clearest sign of overcompensation she’s ever heard of. How did no one ever paint such a picture of this place before? 

Scotch mistakes her stare of incredulity with awe. He smirks and says, “I never get tired of the ladies seeing this place and creaming a little bit.”

“Come on, Scotch, don’t be lewd,” Kotch says, elbowing him. “Let’s get her up there. We’ve got a Coliseum fight to announce.”

“Yeah, yeah. Come on.” Scotch scoffs, but Tifa follows them dutifully up the stairs and through several large, ornate doors into the pagoda-like palace. Another group of Corneo lackeys covers a final door into the mansion, and one of them holds up a hand to get them to stop. He’s got a sort of casual disinterest in his attire and in the way he looks at the three of them walking up. He wears a white shirt with a red-accented black jacket, a baseball cap, and a look of eternal boredom.

“Do we really need to do this every time we bring a girl in, Leslie?” Kotch asks.

Leslie shrugs. “You do your jobs, I do mine. Show me the recommendation for this one.”

Kotch pulls out a slip of paper with a clearly-identifiable chocobo stamp on it. “This is Tifa.”

“ _ Miss _ Tifa,” Scotch corrects with a sarcastic grin.

“Uh huh. And she’s really the only one for tonight? Didn’t get anything from Andrea or the Madam?”

“Guess not. You guys got her from here?” Kotch nudges her forward. “We’ve gotta go make our money. This escort shit doesn’t pay the bills.”

They begin to walk away, and Tifa lets out a little breath in relief that they’re going. They are overbearing and not a little bit gross. 

The man named Leslie, looks about the same age as Tifa, sighs and nods to the other guys. “Open it up. Follow him upstairs and do not leave the room until you’re called for, got it?”

“Will I be meeting Don Corneo soon?” she asks, trying to cover her interrogation with innocent curiosity.

“Tonight after the Corneo Cup. And if we get any other candidates, you’ll have a chance to impress him before he makes his decision tonight.”

“Candidates?”

Leslie sighs again. “The Don is very picky. If you’re very lucky, you’ll have competition for his attentions tonight.”

“Other girls,” she says, mostly to herself. That could go very wrong.

“I wouldn’t worry too much,” one of the other guys says. “It’s getting late in the day for new arrivals.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Tifa says, smiling at them all. “I hope I don’t have to compete.”

“You’ll wish you did,” Leslie says under his breath, and Tifa cocks her head at him. He clears his throat. “Up you go, Miss Tifa. You’ll get called when it’s time.”

“Thank you, Leslie.” She smiles for him, but she gets the strangest stomach-churning vibe off him. He’s not like the others, and he seems to be hinting that whatever’s in store for her tonight, it’s not going to be good.

But she allows herself to be guided up the stairs inside this opulent palace. The ground floor just overflows with crates and storage of Wutai furnishings. The other lackey walks up behind her, several steps below and leering at her. She holds her hands behind her back, keeping the skirt from flapping out and displaying her goods to this pervert. Despite herself, she blushes with embarrassment and anger.

To distract him, she waves a hand out over the vast collection of Wutai junk. “Don Corneo seems to have a love for foreign things.”

“He loves anything that other people can’t get. We’re at war with Wutai? He buys hundreds of thousands of gil worth of black market Wutai products. Same with women. What he can’t have, he buys.”

The guy in front says, “Miss Tifa? Through these doors.” There are three sets of doors on the second floor, but Tifa is led through the doors farthest from the exit. This feels like it’s on purpose, so that any girl who decides to back out has a long way to travel to leave. And she’s beginning to suspect that leaving isn’t an option.

The room they lead her into is likewise opulently furnished, with several paintings of women in lascivious poses or mythological Wutai dragons curled up around them protectively. She notes there is not a bed or anywhere to really sit in here. 

“Sorry, could I trouble you for a drink? It was a long trip and I admit I’m nervous to meet him.”

The first guy grins at the second guy and says, “Sure, doll, coming right up. You just wait here.” She doesn’t like the sound of that at all. If they bring her anything, she intends to dump it for fear of it being drugged. The doors shut behind them, and immediately lock. She almost rushes to the doors to try and force them open, but she’s being shy, demure. Passive and trusting. She wouldn’t break a door down the moment she’s alone.

But she waits for several minutes, and when no one comes back with a drink, she attempts to open the door, tentatively. Like a person who doesn’t realize it’s locked.

It doesn’t open, and she knocks timidly. “Um, hello? Is there a bathroom somewhere?”

She doesn’t receive a response, but a hissing sound reaches her ears. It sounds pneumatic, not animal, and she glances around for vents. A green smoke billows out of several vents in the walls, choking her. She sucks in a great breath, not knowing what this is, and holds it while she thinks about what to do. If they’re just trying to knock her out, they can wait out her lungs. If they’ve done this often, they’ll know all the tricks. She isn’t going to dramatically pass out early and get them to open the doors.

They’ll wait several minutes. And she’ll be unconscious. She searches for some material to cover her mouth, but this room is mostly paintings and wood or metal furniture, like shelves. Nothing she can use as a makeshift filter.

She can’t let them do this to her! She strides toward the door, already wanting to take a breath, her lungs screaming for oxygen. She’s going to get one chance at this, and if those doors are as sturdy as they look, that one chance is razor thin.

She hikes up her already short skirt to give her complete freedom of motion, and charges at the double doors. She jumps at them, raising both legs up to apply as much force to her kick as she can. She connects with the handles on the doors, and shoves out at them like her legs are pistons. 

The handles break off with a clang and the door shudders, but holds firm. She falls back and twists to land in a crouch. Now that she’s exerting herself, her vision goes blurry and her body does everything in its power to get her to exhale and breathe in. She holds it in, feeling sluggish as she goes back to the door and tries to prise it open with her fingernails. It doesn’t work, of course, and she bangs against the door.

Laughter from outside incenses her, but she’s out of energy. She has to breathe or pass out, and breathing probably leads to passing out.

Her vision dims, and she drops to the floor. This was supposed to go different! This was going to be a simple mission: in, extract information, get back to Sector 7 and prepare for what’s next. Instead she’s going to pass out and be subjected to something she can’t even imagine.

She can’t stand it any longer. Her chest wants to burst with the pressure of holding in what’s rapidly becoming poison to her lungs, and she tries one last time to bang at the door, only to hear laughter against her feeble attempts. 

The air whooshes out of her, and in its place a toxic gas fills her lungs, choking her. She almost immediately loses consciousness as her body drops to the floor.

*****

Aerith breathes in the life of Sector 7, learning its smells and tastes. It’s been a long time since she’s had reason to be here. It’s more spread out than Sector 5, not as cramped as Sector 6, and the people here all seem to be in high spirits. She passes by a neighborhood watch all gloating over how safe things have been since the merc came to town. She passes by a schoolyard with kids running here and there, talking about the Lifestream and learning Mathematics. There doesn’t seem to be an orphanage here, which is a good thing, Aerith supposes. She pulls out several flowers by their stems, handing them out to the little girls and boys as she goes, and they all delightedly take them, gossiping to each other about the flower girl. Normally she’d be charging a pittance for them, but she’s flush with gil at the moment after selling some of the curatives to the Sector 5 medics, and she can afford to be frivolous for the sake of strangers.

She wonders briefly where the gorgeous woman in the chocobo carriage lives, and has a strong suspicion as she passes a rowdy building with a bunch of pretty young women, arguing about clothing and makeup, dress rehearsals and the like. All dressed up as she was, perhaps she lives at this burgeoning actors’ studio. She smiles cheerily at them, handing out yellow and white flowers as she goes. One of them, a tall and lithe girl with brown hair and an easy smile, tries to pay her for the flower, but Aerith just skips along, refusing gil. 

Aerith continues on her way, looking for the 7th Heaven bar and passing out cheer and joy in the form of smiles and flowers. Some regard her with suspicion, and the neighborhood watch with their guns and their red bandanas eye her curiously, but she doesn’t let it get to her. It pays to be wary of new faces in the slums. Not much lateral movement down here. If you end up in the Sector 5 Slums, that’s where you tend to stay. Anyone else has either fallen on hard times, is a con artist, or an outright thief.

But she smiles and hands out flowers and keeps her eyes open until, finally, she sees the sign hanging above the low buildings. Big stylized number 7, hard to miss once you cleared the outskirts. There’s a large open space, like the public square in front of the big screen in Sector 5, that faces the bar. It seems to be in decent shape, with seating on the front porch area. At this time of day, there’s a few older people sipping beer and iced tea, chatting with passersby. 

Aerith takes a deep breath, drawing her courage up for a confrontation. If the dead man had been hanging around here, and he was an eco terrorist, that could mean others of that sort are around. She doesn’t really know if she wants to get involved with that level of rebellion, but her curiosity over his gear and his eyes being so similar to Zack decides her. Whatever else happens, she can’t go home quite yet, and might need to make some fast friends. Fortunately, she’s very good at that.

There’s a man from the neighborhood watch at the door, acting like a bouncer. He’s handsome, if a bit stiff, and she notes him watching her the moment she starts in the direction of the bar. He eases the door open, says something she can’t hear at this distance, and closes it up again. A curtain at one of the windows ruffles, and Aerith is now sure she’s being watched. Curious.

Aerith hands a yellow flower to the old woman at a table, and bobs her head cheerfully at the woman’s unexpected delight. She steps within a few feet of the man at the door, noting that he has a pistol and a combat knife. The way he carries his shoulders, he’s often had cause to carry a rifle. She’s seen a lot of soldiers, a lot of grunts, in her days, and this man is no stranger to a fight.

“Hi there!” she says, stopping and holding out a hand to him. “My name’s Aerith, what’s yours?”

The man ignores her hand and then his eyes dart to her satchel. The dead man’s satchel. “Business, and it’s none of yours.”

She pouts playfully with a big frown. “I’m a big scary bully, watch me turn away customers,” she says in a mock deep voice. 

“Hey Biggs, I see you met the flower girl already,” a bright and cheery voice says from behind Aerith. It’s the tall girl from the women’s dorms she met a little bit ago, only now she’s got form-fitting armor and a red bandana tied around her head. 

“Cool, I guess we’re just sharing our names with any pretty faces we come across,” the man, Biggs, says. He sighs. “After last night, we need to be more careful.”

“Careful shmareful,” the woman says. “Look at her, do you think she’s gonna roll inside the bar and start shooting?”

“I don’t know what she’s gonna do, but it’s not gonna be inside the bar. Boss’s orders.” Biggs crosses his arms in front of his chest. “In fact, why don’t you wait right here… Aerith, right?”

Aerith smiles and nods. “I was hoping to talk to anyone working last night. I’m looking for--a friend,” she lies. She has the distinct impression that Biggs recognized the bag she’s wearing, and it set him on edge.

“Yeah, just wait right here. Jessie, you got her for a minute?”

“Right as rain, Biggie.” Jessie, the woman neighborhood watch, winks at him and takes up his position at the door while he steps inside.

“Cautious lot,” Aerith says. “I didn’t know you were on neighborhood watch.” She sizes the woman up a little bit, deciding that her first impression was a bad one. She’s fit and ready for action, and there’s a familiar spark of mischievousness in Jessie’s eyes that Aerith recognizes all too well.

“He’s always been that way,” Jessie says, shrugging. Finally her eyes take in Aerith, the hastily-mended rips in her favorite pink dress, the smudges of dirt that wouldn’t come out of her little red jacket. “You’ve seen a hard day, I’d wager.”

“You’d win that bet,” Aerith says brightly. “Were you at the bar last night, Jessie?”

“I--wasn’t. Patrol.” Aerith catches that hesitation, wonders if it’s a lie or just a dodge.

Before they can continue the conversation, the door opens back up and Biggs gestures at Jessie. They whisper back and forth a moment, and then both nod. 

“Boss says you can come in,” Biggs finally says. 

“Sorry, I haven’t lived in the slums my entire life just to blindly walk into a trap. I’m looking for someone who knew the man this bag and materia owned.”

The door bursts open now, shoving Biggs out of the way, and a shorter, pudgy man with a red bandana and a gravelly voice pops out. “You’ve seen Cloud? Is he okay?”

Aerith recoils from him in surprise, but Jessie’s behind her, preventing her escape. She taps her knuckles against her breastplate. “Sorry, but you’re not leaving until we get answers, ‘mkay?”

A towering black man with some kind of machine gun contraption in place of an arm also appears at the doorway. “Come on in, Aerith. We got some talking points.”

A young girl’s voice cries out, “No, Daddy, she gave us pretty flowers! She’s not mean!”

One of the little girls at the schoolyard comes rushing up from the street, and hides behind the big black man, of all people. Well, Aerith isn’t one to judge. Families come in all shapes and sizes in the slums. Adoption is pretty normal. 

The black man opens his mouth in surprise at the interruption. “Marlene! You’re s’posed to be at school.”

“I was coming back to show you the flower, like the one Tifa had! She was giving them away to everyone.” Marlene points to Aerith, who smiles.

“Aw, you’re welcome, Marlene. Here, you can have the rest.” She opens up the satchel and pulls the last few flowers free, holding them out to the little girl. 

Marlene’s eyes open wide as saucers and she glances up at her father. “Can I, Daddy?”

The man glances down at Marlene, then up at Aerith, and his shoulders relax. “Yeah, okay. We got some questions for you, Aerith, like how’d you get that bag and how did you know to come here?”

The pudgy neighborhood watch man says, “Come on, she’s obviously seen him. Is he okay? Did Cloud survive the fall?”

Aerith stands and watches them all, eyes sad now. She says, “Sorry. We shouldn’t talk about this in front of the girl.”

The black man grunts in acknowledgement, and says, “Wedge, take Marlene back to school. Do not take her to visit your cats first.”

The pudgy man scoffs, but Aerith has the impression that he absolutely will do that regardless. Wedge nods and holds his hand out for Marlene. “Come on, kid. You gotta learn or you’ll never be smarter than Jessie.”

Jessie elbows him playfully as they pass by. Aerith waves goodbye to the little girl, and sighs. “Cute kid.”

The black man says, “Adorable. Now if you don’t mind, let’s talk.” He holds the door open for Aerith while Jessie and Biggs offer her sheepish smiles. Her earlier worry of this being a trap isn’t gone, not completely, but their crestfallen faces when she wouldn’t outright say Cloud was alive or dead tells them everything she needs to know.

These are good people, and they’re not going to hurt her.

She steps inside the bar, handing the satchel over as she goes. It no longer has the fire or the cure materia; those are hers now. The rest are intact.

Once they’re all inside, the big man sighs. “So he’s dead.”

Aerith nods. “He fell out of the sky.”

Biggs scoffs. “How do we know she’s talking about the same guy, Barret?”

“Not a lot of folk fall off the plate,” the big black man says. He shrugs. “Describe him, uh, if you can.”

Aerith does, and it takes no time at all for their eyes to go wide and for the reality to set in. Barret curses, Biggs shakes his head in disbelief, and Jessie stares at the floor.

Jessie finally says, “Yeah… that’s him. Stupid man, dying just to avoid going on a date with me.”

Biggs chuckles at the apparent joke. “Hey, at least you don’t have to pay him, now, Boss.”

“Ain’t funny. That spiky-haired chump was Tifa’s friend, and I know y’all got close to him.”

“It’s kinda funny,” Jessie says, standing now. “I didn’t think anything could kill him.”

“Just ‘cause he was SOLDIER doesn’t make him immortal.”

Aerith says, “So he  _ was _ a SOLDIER.”

“You know about them?” Biggs asks.

Aerith shrugs. “I knew one, once. Long time ago.” Not that long ago, but they don’t need to know that. “You guys are that environmental rebellion group, Avalanche, right? The ones responsible for the bombings.”

Barret shrugs. “Suppose we are. What do you intend to do with that information?”

Aerith knows this is dangerous territory. They’re terrorists, no argument about that. But the planet feels stronger since they took out the reactors. They might be breaking laws, but they’re doing a good thing overall. 

She says, “I’m also on the run from a Shinra organization. I guess what I intend to do with this information is… join the resistance.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Chapter: The Plate Falls


	3. The Plate Falls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tifa struggles in Don Corneo's dungeon and learns a terrifying secret. 
> 
> Aerith makes some new friends and joins the fight to stop Shinra from destroying Sector 7.

Tifa doesn’t know how long she was out, but when she first stirs, she can’t see anything, and there’s something strapped in her mouth, preventing her from talking. Her head pounds from whatever that gas was. She struggles to move and cry out, but her wrists and ankles are bound with some heavy chain that clinks when she shifts, and she only succeeds in making tiny moans.

“Oh ho, she’s awake!” a voice calls out. It is weasely and grating, and she imagines it belongs to a pasty-faced man with patchy beard and a bald spot.

The hood covering her face slides off, and a harsh light above her head blinds her momentarily. She sees only shadows until her eyes adjust, and she sees two things:

The first is that she wasn’t wrong about this man. He’s pasty, ugly, balding, and grinning like a fool over a steak. His massive belly hovers over the edge of the table she’s strapped to, and he runs a hand along his mouth, wiping away saliva. So gross. 

The second is that she’s in a dungeon. Like a torture room out of some bawdy adventure tale. There’s a stretching rack in the corner. A table with an assortment of torture implements, or perhaps they’re supposed to be sex toys to this depraved man.

“Allow me to introduce myself, Miss Tifa,” he says, gleefully running a hand down her face, caressing her cheek. She shakes her head trying to throw it off, but he merely grabs the wooden stake in her mouth, holding her still. “I suggest you play nice, girlie. I’m a reasonable man with reasonable needs, and since you were the only girl on the docket tonight, you won by default! How lucky for you!” He guffaws and turns away, laying fingers on some of the items on the table.

Tifa struggles more, rattling the chains that hold her down and releasing a stream of invectives that come out as angry mumbles.

Don Corneo turns back to her, giggling cruelly, and reaches for her face again. She swings her head back and forth, and he slaps her. Not hard, but enough to shock her, and she seethes. Tears form at the corners of her eyes. Never in her life has she been this vulnerable, this close to true danger. Not since--

She shoves the memories of Nibelheim away.

“Now now, my dear,” Corneo says, running his fingers along the red space on her cheek where he slapped her. “I’d promise to remove your gag if you’d promise not to scream for help, but to be fair, your screams won’t leave this very nice dungeon, and sometimes I like a little fear crying.”

The gorge in Tifa’s throat rises. This man is completely despicable, and she’s at his mercy, of which he appears to have none. But she tries not to panic. There’s information to be gained. She wants to throw up, and curl into a ball, and never see the light of day again even thinking about what she might have to do. But what’s the other option? Give up? Wait ‘til he gets bored with her and has her disposed of? 

So she calms down. Tifa Lockhart is a member of Avalanche, and they always follow through with their missions. She leans her face into the Don’s pudgy, clammy hand, and tries to remember how she looks at Cloud.

“Oh, aren’t we compliant all of a sudden?” But he chuckles, and reaches his hands behind her head, feeling for the buckle that will release the gag. It slips free and he is careful to pull the gag away quickly, before she could try to bite him. She knows better than to try that while her limbs are immovable. No reason to bring punishment down when she quite literally can’t do anything about it.

With the gag gone, she rotates her jaw and works saliva back into the parts of her mouth that were blocked by the wooden rod. She coughs and tries to speak. “Th-thank you, Don.”

“See, now that’s lovely. I show you a little kindness, you show me a little gratitude.”

“You’re a powerful man, Don Corneo,” Tifa says, playing on his ego. She’s not very good at this, but she’s got to try. “Surely you don’t need to resort to _this_ for willing women?”

He cackles laughter. “Well, no, but willing women just don’t rev the ol’ engine these days, you know? When you sleep with a new girl every night for a couple years, you tend to need some _excitement_.”

Tifa swallows the reply in her throat. She isn’t sure it’s not just actual vomit.

“Could I get some water?” she asks instead.

“I’m not a monster.” He chuckles. “Well, matter of perspective, but yes, I think you can have a drink before we get started.” He disappears from her sight for a minute, and she can’t twist her head to follow him and doesn’t know exactly where he is, so she doesn’t struggle with the chains again. Instead she observes her surroundings, looking for anything she could use to distract him, get him talking. A tinny song begins playing, upbeat and funky, and she can twist her head just enough to see a truly ugly jukebox that looks like a cartoony version of Don Corneo. The man himself steps away from the jukebox, swaying his overlarge hips in what he must think of as seductive, holding a glass of water.

Don Corneo says, “Here you are, my dear. If you try to bite me, things will become much, much worse for you.”

“I’m just thirty, Don.” She accepts the cup to her lips, and briefly considers just spitting it back in his face, but once the water is in her mouth, she drinks greedily, the cup spilling at the edges of her lips. He pulls the cup back, and she swallows what’s left. It’s infuriating that she’s so thankful to him, despite putting her in this position.

“Now, I have a confession, Miss Tifa.” She’s coming to hate that name. He sets the glass down on the table with all the… toys. His smile as he turns back is not kind. “I know you are a member of Avalanche.”

Tifa’s eyes widen and she strains against her bonds, to no effect, of course. 

“You dirty motherf--” Corneo slams his fist into her jaw this time, knocking her head to the side. The rings on his hand rip at the skin of her cheek. He actually doesn’t hit very hard, but the rings make up for it, like a makeshift knuckle duster. 

“I can put the gag back in, Tifa Lockhart.”

She continues to strain, and is rewarded with a tiny bit of movement. She immediately stops, knowing if he notices, she won’t get her chance to escape. She works her jaw, running her tongue over her teeth to feel for loose ones. Blood drips down her cheek, mixing with the water on the table she splashed earlier.

“What do you want with Avalanche?” That he knows her name is cause for concern. Possible that he’s gathered far more intel on them than they realize.

“Hmm. Do I reveal my master plan? What would that say about me?”

Several sarcastic responses come to her, but she is already starting to understand that this maniac wants his ego stroked. “You can say whatever you want, right?”

His lips spread in a grin. “Because you’ve already figured out--you’re not leaving this place alive.”

Chills run down Tifa’s back. She wishes she’d spat on him when she had the chance. “So why is Don Corneo so interested in Avalanche?”

“It’s not really a matter of _my_ interest, my dear. You’ve become something of a thorn in a very big lion’s paw, and I’m just the mouse plucking it.”

“Not many men would call themselves the mouse in that metaphor.”

“Not many men have the ambition of Don Corneo, Miss Tifa. A mouse steals your cheese, and builds his empire. A mouse, with enough patience, can become the lion.”

“What does your boss want with Avalanche, then?”

“Don Corneo answers to no one. Hmm. Wouldn’t want that to get infected.” He holds a finger out like he’s going to touch her cheek again, and she pulls away. “No, I suppose it’s going to be safe to tell you. It’s happening tonight, and your chances of somehow escaping are very slim.”

He pulls up a stool and sits down next to the table. The metal groans under his weight a little, and she has vague hopes that it’ll buckle and dump him to the ground, but it holds.

He tells her an unbelievable story, about the Sector 7 plate, and how it’s going to come crashing down on thousands of people simply to squash out Avalanche. Shinra’s already en route, and the support pillar that holds the sky up high will soon collapse, killing Avalanche. The longer he talks, the more Tifa’s fear and anger grow. This is unbelievable. Unconscionable. 

“How can this be true?” she asks. “I know Shinra’s greedy, but I didn’t think they were just outright evil.”

“Evil is subjective. You should know that. After all, you came here under false pretenses, trying to take advantage of my lovely offer. Isn’t that evil?”

“You’re pathetic human garbage, Corneo.”

“I’m a lion in waiting, Miss Lockhart. Haven’t you been listening?” He stands up, adjusting his pants under his cruddy red robe. “I’m going to send in one of the boys with instructions to clean you up. Wouldn’t want that to scar.”

“You can’t leave me down here while Shinra’s planning to murder all those people. Please, Don Corneo! There are innocent people in Sector 7. Children.” When he isn’t swayed by her plea, she rethinks it. “Think about all the beautiful women you’ll miss out on.”

“Oh ho ho, you’re speaking my language, dear. But one thing that’s certain in this life: there’ll always be more women.” He runs a finger down her side and grins when she squirms away from it.

He leaves, and Tifa immediately pulls herself together. She’s got to get free. There’s nothing more important than warning Sector 7. They have to stop it. They have to evacuate. And they’ll never know it’s coming unless she breaks free.

She starts struggling, yanking at the loose chain she felt earlier. If she can just get one hand free, she can pull the straps on the chains loose for the rest. Hell, if she can get a leg loose, she can use that leverage to help with the arm chains. 

She tenses, and releases. Tense, and release. Strain and relax. But the more she struggles, the more tired she gets, and the harder her head pounds from whatever toxic gas they used to knock her out earlier.

She makes a tiny bit of progress, then hears hollow, echoing steps approaching. She settles back and waits. Kotch comes in, with his mohawk and puffy jacket. “Aw, Miss Tifa, you made the boss angry.” He carries a bowl of water and a first aid kit, which he sets down on the table next to her and sits on the stool. 

“Kotch, do you know what Corneo is a part of? What’s happening tonight?”

Kotch nods. “It’s a bad deal, but what can you do? Listen, Miss Tifa, I’m gonna put this gag back in so you don’t get any funny ideas. You’re cool with that, right? Can’t risk you getting hold of my wrist and making a mess of things.”

Tifa resists, but Kotch gets the wooden gag back in her mouth and cinches it shut. He talks the entire time he’s patching up her cheek, putting a bandage on it. He talks himself up, how he and Scotch ran the Coliseum and watched all the usual suspects dominate. The beastmaster, the thugs, the cutters. Nothing unusual tonight.

Once he’s done patching her up, he removes the gag again. “For what it’s worth,” Kotch says, “I’m from Sector 7.”

“So why do you think this is okay? You can help me, and we can take the Don down.”

He laughs. “No one takes Corneo down, Miss Tifa. My suggestion for you would be to forget about all that stuff, and think of a happy place. You’re gonna need it in the days to come.”

“Kotch!” she cries, real tears forming now. “You bastard! You could stop this!”

He cranks the volume up on the jukebox, waves goodbye as he leaves the room, and she can faintly hear whistling as he goes about his day. No one in this organization can be spared. Not a one.

*****

Aerith shares what she knows about this man named Cloud, which boils down to his death and the Turks collecting his body. And what these people know of him is surprisingly little for all that they seemed worried about him. A mercenary with connections to the bar owner, Tifa. A man who joined the resistance for money, and who people like Jessie and Wedge got overly fond of, given their reactions.

But when she learns even this little bit, there’s a tug at her insides. Something is there, something important. Maybe it’s confirmation that he was a SOLDIER, like Zack. But for the briefest moment, the shadows dart about her in the dimly lit Seventh Heaven bar. They vanish almost as they appeared, and the members of Avalanche don’t notice at all.

Just as well. She doesn’t know what they’re doing, and doesn’t have time to explore it.

“I can’t believe he’s really gone,” Wedge says. “He broke my high score on darts and now he’s dead. I can’t even enjoy taking it back from him now.”

Jessie snorts laughter, but Aerith can tell she’s holding back emotions, pent up inside her. She liked the man, and her domineering personality would have let him know it.

“Ain’t funny,” Barret says again, echoing their earlier conversation. He seems to be at a loss for what to do now. Tifa’s on mission, and they’re holding down the fort until she completes it. “How are we gonna tell Tifa the boy’s dead when she makes her way back here?”

“Sorry, I just have to ask,” Aerith says, “Do you know anything about Wall Market?”

He shrugs. “Not a lot of call for that type of entertainment when we’re fighting a damn war.”

“Well, from what you’ve told me, Tifa’s in trouble if she went in alone.”

“She’s a big girl,” Biggs says. “You’ve never seen her roundhouse kick a bandit before, but trust me, she’ll knock your head off.” He gets a softer expression on his face now. “You said you’re from Sector 5? How’s the Leaf House?”

Aerith smiles. “You know about the orphanage?”

He shrugs a little from his position leaning on a wall, arms crossed. “I used to help out around there. Long time ago.”

“It’s good! The kids are always striving to learn and laugh. There’s never enough to go around, but they never lack for compassion and beauty.”

He nods, a little secret grin on his lips. “I’d like to take a trip back there someday. We’ve been kinda busy, what with saving the planet and all.”

“So serious,” she jokes.

Barret clears his throat. “It _is_ serious, Miss Gainsborough. You know what they’re doing to--”

“I know it, Mr. Wallace,” Aerith interrupts him. Probably better than you do. “I already got the pamphlet, you don’t need to give me the hard sell.”

He grunts, clearly not knowing what to do with being interrupted. “Well, good,” he finally says, standing up. “We’ve got plans to make, and they didn’t include you. Jessie, can you go with Aerith for now? Keep her out of trouble while we go over next steps, contingencies for where we hit next.”

They don’t trust her, but they also can’t just leave her by herself. Though she’s been kind and forthright, they’re suspicious. Right to be.

Jessie nods and waves her hand in a “come on” gesture. “I’ll give her the tour and we’ll bring back some grub, yeah?”

“Sounds good. There’s been a lot of Shinra copters floating about today, so keep an eye to that pizza.” Barret dismisses them with that, and Jessie leads Aerith out into the early evening. She hadn’t realized so much time had passed while they were in there swapping stories.

The artificial darkness of the evening, with the sun lamps dimming to bring on night, makes Aerith yawn, and then her stomach growls loud enough for Jessie to hear. The girl chuckles.

“Well, all right. We’ll hit the kabob stall first and then the proper show-around.”

Jessie starts walking, and Aerith falls in step beside her. Aerith whispers, “So you guys really are the bombers? Lots of people died or got hurt in those explosions.”

Jessie’s face flinches and her shoulders hunch. “Yeah… Shinra did that, actually. After the mission last night, we found out they were using us as scapegoats. I knew my explosives weren’t enough to cause that, but Heidegger of Shinra freely confirmed it for us.”

“Shinra killed innocent civilians, just to make you look worse?”

Jessie nods, her dour expression vanishing behind a false smile. “Yeah, makes it easier to hate them, you know? A power structure where they freely murder their own people for an agenda is corrupt. Even if they weren’t killing the planet, they’re still killing people and leaving hundreds of thousands in poverty.”

Aerith doesn’t say that she’s always liked the metal sky, and hadn’t ever really thought she was poor. A rich life filled with beauty, laughter, love. How much better might it be if she wasn’t stealing all these moments of wonder from under a corporate hellscape?

She doesn’t have time to wonder about this for long, though, because a wave of Shinra helicopters comes swooping out of the distance, their hum growing louder by the second.

“Okay, scratch all that,” Jessie says. “What’s this new horror Shinra’s doing?”

She jogs back to the Seventh Heaven bar, and Aerith follows. Barret, Biggs, and Wedge come bursting out of the bar about the time Aerith and Jessie catch up to the open space in front of it, and Barret shouts, “What the shit are they doing?”

“They’re surrounding the pillar!” Biggs says, pointing at their formation. “Do they think someone’s going to attack it?”

“No,” Jessie says, reaching for her sidearm. “No, based on what we learned last night, they’re making everyone think someone’s attacking it. They know we’re here.”

“You don’t mean--” Barret starts, and Jessie nods and finishes for him, “they’re gonna bring down the entire sector, and blame it on us.”

Aerith’s gut drops. There’s no way. “They might be corrupt, but that’s just pure evil,” she says. “Can they even do it? It must take a lot of explosives to bring down a pillar.”

Jessie nods. “The worst kept secret about Shinra tech is that they build in obsolescence. Gotta be able to break it in order to build a new one.”

Biggs says, “That fucking thing has explosives built into its entire structure, for controlled demolition. And you can activate it way up there.” He points to the top of the pillar, where already soldiers are offloading from choppers and taking up defensive positions.

“I believe it,” Barret says, holding Cloud’s satchel back out to her. “They wanna kill people to prove we’re bad, they’ll kill a whole lot more to make it worse.” He holds his gun arm up and the machine gun activates when he taps it with his other hand. 

“We’re gonna go stop this mess. You in, Miss Gainsborough?”

She takes the satchel. “I’m not much of a fighter, but I can hold my own.”

Barret grins. “Good. Time to show these Shinra thugs what they’re really messing with.”

Biggs runs inside the bar and comes back out moments later hefting two assault rifles and a bag of ammunition. “And you all thought I was crazy for having a stash inside the bar.”

“You’re still crazy for that,” Wedge says, accepting a rifle. “Guns and drunks don’t mix.”

“We can argue that shit later,” Barret says. “For now, we’ve gotta stop Shinra.”

Wedge and Jessie run off to coordinate with the Neighborhood Watch and make sure Marlene gets home safely, while Barret leads Biggs and Aerith to the base of the pillar. Members of the Watch and others with seemingly no affiliation join their group. Other soldiers in Avalanche?

He issues orders to them, and they scatter. Evacuation plans. The backup in case they can’t stop Shinra from toppling the tower. Once they reach the base of the pillar, they find Shinra soldiers have taken up defensive positions both inside and outside the fenced-in structure. Normally only a single guard was on duty here. Someone should have realized this, Aerith thinks. Someone should have reported the increased activity.

Doesn’t matter now.

When the soldiers clock Barret and the others approaching, they nudge each other and point guns. “Stop your approach,” the leader says. He’s wearing a red uniform compared to the blue of the foot soldiers, and he’s got one of those riot shields lazily positioned to his side. It comes up in front of him, protecting him in case Barret starts shooting.

Barret snaps his fingers, and their party scatters. Aerith stands there like a moogle in headlights until Barret grabs her arm and drags her behind a truck. 

“Forgot you wouldn’t know all the signals,” he says. “They’re gonna start shooting, and we can’t let that stop us. Understood?”

Aerith shakes from fear. She’s been in bad situations before, some of them as recent as the day before, but this is different. She’s running towards the danger now, instead of away from it. Instead of mitigation, she’s being asked to murder.

Can she do it? To stop the murder or thousands, she can. She nods.

“Cloud had something for this,” she says, reaching in for one of the materia from the satchel. They’re all carrying guns and have tech. She can’t hit them all, but she can cause a stir.

“Oh, you know how that stuff works? I was never very good with it.” Barret grins, then whistles to Biggs and the other Avalanche member who are positioned behind a cart. The area is vacant otherwise, with the people of Sector 7 wise enough to know a group of Shinra soldiers usually meant bullets were going to fly.

“Do it,” Barret says.

Aerith peeks out from behind the truck, getting line of sight on the soldiers, and concentrates on the materia. Lightning materializes in an instant, striking the fence and shocking one of the soldiers leaning up against it. A transformer attached to the fence blows, and sparks shoot out among the soldiers. Panic and confusion reign; shots fire out; Barret and the others rush out of cover and charge the group, shooting as they go. The one she doesn’t know drops from a hail of gunfire. The lead Shinra soldier hides behind his shield. The others are shot down in their panic and Aerith uses a different materia while Barret plows into the shield, knocking it away and firing a few rounds into the man’s chest.

The cure materia has no effect on the Avalanche member who was shot. She kneels down and checks his pulse. Dead. Aerith has seen a lot of bodies in a short time, and she can’t tear her eyes away from this man she doesn’t know. 

Whom she couldn’t help.

Biggs jars her out of her shock by shaking her shoulder. “Hey, if you can’t do this, tell us now. We’re about to shoot our way to the top and we can’t babysit you.”

Barret rips the fence free in a corner and steps through. “Help us or help the Watch. We can’t wait.”

Aerith stares at the man on the ground one last time, working up her courage. “I can help.”

She stands, and holds her staff defensively in front of her. Biggs nods at her and leads the way into the fenced-in area. Barret lets the fence fall back into place, and looks up.

“That’s a lotta steps…” he says. 

Biggs jokes, “Least it’s not Shinra Tower.”

Barret nods. “Guess we best hustle.”

They only make it to the third platform before the soldiers from the top have filtered down, and take up defensive positions. One sets up a turret, and they have to deal with them before they can move on. Aerith targets the turret with lightning, while Biggs and Barret take out the soldiers with their guns. The turret glitches and fizzles out, and as they run past it and reach the stairs that continue up, it suddenly reactivates. Barret and Biggs are beyond it, but Aerith is so surprised by it that she swings out wildly with her staff, and the thing topples over before it can target and fire.

“Good shot,” Biggs calls as they charge headlong into more danger above.

It takes several minutes to scale the tower, and the things Shinra employs to fend them off are a strange assortment of soldiers, flying drones, and men with copters and guns floating just out of reach. In a tense moment, one of the copter soldiers rises up behind Barret with a free shot at his back, and Aerith throws her staff at his whirling copter blades. It collides with the blades, where they shatter and send the staff flying into a corner. He drops into a crumpled heap behind Barret, who clocks the motion behind him and drives his giant heel into the man’s chest, taking him out of the fight completely. Aerith can almost hear the crunch of his ribcage as she looks away.

Closer to the top, Biggs takes point and almost immediately takes a bullet to the shoulder. He falls back, laughing at his own stupidity, and they pause for a moment while Aerith uses her materia to try and help. This doesn’t really do miraculous curing, and all she manages to do is lessen the bleeding on both sides. Clear shot. Bullets hail overhead, and a chopper looks like it’s finally taking notice of the action below the top of the pillar, and is shining its lights around looking for them.

“I’ll be fine,” Biggs says, holding his shoulder to keep pressure on it. “We’re running out of time. You gotta get up there.”

Aerith shakes her head. “We should get you to safety.”

Before Barret or Biggs can disagree, the shadows swarm around her, pushing her back. Into the gunfire and away from Biggs. The two men stare at her with confusion as she struggles against forces they can’t see.

But Barret says, “What the hell are those?”

Aerith, recognizing she’s about to get riddled with bullets, doesn’t have time to process that Barret can see the shadows now. She grabs a random materia out of the bag and holds it in between her palms, almost like a prayer, and concentrates on it. The shadows dance away from her just as her magic unleashes. A gust of wind buffets the spray of bullets, sending them off-course and spanging off metal harmlessly behind her. The wind knocks the soldiers back, and gives the trio a much-needed opportunity. Barret doesn’t wait. He charges from behind their cover while Biggs tosses his last grenade over Barret’s head. 

The grenade explodes in a swirling puff of smoke, choking the soldiers. Moments before Barret reaches the confused group, the wind whips the smoke away, and Barret knocks one the soldiers clean off the tower. His scream is long and abruptly cut short. Barret fires indiscriminately at the other two soldiers still on the tower, taking them down in their panic and confusion.

Biggs yells, “Go! Stop this!”

Aerith spares him a determined grin. He returns it, though his grin is laced with pain.

She joins Barret at the final stairwell leading up to the top platform, and he gives her an approving nod. “You ready for this?”

“Not even a little bit, but let’s do it.”

Before they can, though, the chopper’s lights find them, and a hail of bullets dances through the space. They dive for cover. After the bulletstorm, a familiar voice rings out from the chopper, amplified and ear-piercing:

“I don’t believe it,” the voice says. “I guess flower girls can be extremists, after all.”

“Turks,” Aerith hisses. “No wonder they got called away from chasing me if this was the new assignment.”

Barret scoffs and pokes his head out long enough for the hail of gunfire to begin again, and ducks back down. “What the hell’d you do to piss off the suits?”

Aerith shakes her head. No time. “If we live through this, I’ll tell you the story.”

“When we live through this, I’ll bring the popcorn.” The gunfire dies down again, and Barret looks around at their surroundings. Biggs has posted up farther inside the platform, nursing his wounded shoulder but in no immediate danger.

“We gotta make a move and at least take out their guns,” Barret says.

“I can hit them with lightning,” she offers, “if you can get me a second of focus.”

“I’ll draw their fire. Hit the rotor on the blades if you can.”

She nods. She has no idea what a rotor is, but if she can channel enough of her own will into the materia, it should short out anything electrical on that chopper.

“Come on out, terrorists! We aren’t letting you destroy the pillar!” Reno’s voice is snarky and Aerith wants nothing more than to shut him up in that moment. Using a public display to push a fake narrative, it’s gross and horrible. He deserves whatever’s about to come his way.

The lights from the chopper flash overhead, and Barret dashes out, firing indiscriminately at the flying machine. It immediately tilts his direction, and the miniguns spool up to begin firing. Surely he’s not fast enough to avoid this.

Aerith steps up from cover and holds the materia out, concentrating. She’s going to get one shot at this. The essence of the planet flows through her, and she can feel it cry out in pain as she prepares to kill with that energy.

Only the chopper spins back to her the moment they see her, and dips down out of sight as her lightning arcs harmlessly into the metal sky.

And an explosion sounds from down below, followed by Jessie shouting, “Hell yeah! Avalanche, one and stupid Shinra choppers, zero.”

The helicopter veers back up into view, an image of distress as it tilts left and right. Reno’s voice comes back out again, “Bitches! We’re coming for you.” The lower part of the helicopter, including the guns, is a twisted wreck of fire and steel, and sparks shoot out ominously as it lifts out of view.

Immediately there is a crash above them, the helicopter landing roughly on the top platform. Aerith hopes it killed them, but it doesn’t seem likely.

Another chopper weaves into view, and begins firing on the floor below them, where Jessie presumably was climbing the pillar. Biggs yells, “I’ll back her up! Get your asses up there and stop this!”

Aerith and Barret nod, and charge up the steps to the final platform. Aerith ducks for cover behind a transformer as Barret unloads a full cylinder from his gun arm, peppering the Shinra soldiers. The helicopter has crashed on the other side of the pillar support controls, behind a chain-link fence. Smoke and fire roil out of the chopper, but the Turks emerge unharmed.

Rude’s glasses have broken again, but he withdraws a new pair from his suit jacket’s breast pocket. How many pairs does he have?

They’re not carrying guns. Barret grins at them as he takes up a defensive position at the pillar controls. “End of the line, ya murderin’ shits.” Aerith joins him, wary of another helicopter joining the fight.

Rude easily rips the fence free and steps through, while Reno leaps up and over the tall fencing without even trying. These two are dangerous, for damn sure. Aerith clears her throat, wiping away sweat and holding her battered staff defensively.

She whispers, “They’re both freakishly fast, and strong. Might not be SOLDIER, but they’re enhanced all the same.”

Barret nods. “Put enough rounds in ‘em, they stop moving eventually.”

Aerith chuckles, but doesn’t have a witty retort. She’s terrified, and this wasn’t really her fight until just now, when the Turks showed up. She wonders if Tseng is around.

“Well, well, well,” Reno says, tapping his electric baton on his shoulder for each word. He and Rude spread out, forcing Barret to choose who to aim at. He chooses Reno, which Aerith thinks is probably unwise, but he sprints forward instead of monologuing or giving Barret time to fire.

“What the fu--” Barret starts, but his voice cuts off as Reno’s elbow nails Barret in the stomach, knocking the breath out of him and doubling him over. Aerith swings her staff at the all too pretty man, but he’s way too fast. He lazily deflects her strike with his baton, takes a moment to grin like a jackass, and uses the momentum of his deflection to yank her off balance, throwing her away from the pillar controls.

Her world spins and she loses hold of her staff. She lands roughly, tearing skin and clothing as she bounces once, then skids to a stop near the edge of the metal platform. She spits red and glares.

“You’re not supposed to end things before I get to punch someone,” Rude says. 

With Barret struggling to breathe and Aerith disoriented, the Turks must think they’ve won before the fight ever began. Reno dances back from Barret’s weakened swing and kicks the leg out from under him, dropping him to the platform as he wheezes.

Reno says, “He’s got some fight in him. Give him a round or two.”

Rude approaches Aerith, though, and she struggles to stand, to get hold of an orb of materia, to rally any kind of defense at all. He asks, “You think we’ll get a bonus for completing the Ancients mission at the same time as the frame job?”

Reno shrugs and approaches the pillar. “We better. My chest still hurts from that lucky shit she pulled to get away.”

Rude chuckles and grabs the satchel as Aerith goes to dig for something to fight back with. He pulls her off balance again, and yanks her around for a moment, attempting to free the satchel from her body. She holds on tight, though, and spits in his face for good measure. A glob of red spittle trails down his cheek, but he barely even reacts to it.

Rude says, “At least you didn’t lose a game of dodge the iceketball.”

Reno laughs at that. “Boss always says you’re too serious, but we know better.” He works at the controls while Aerith struggles and Barret coughs, regaining his breath.

“Y-you can’t,” Barret manages. “You’re killing thousands of people. Innocent fucking people!”

Reno shrugs, pulling up pillar self-destruct menus, navigating through them. “Boss says jump, we destroy a sector.” Rude yanks on Aerith’s satchel again, pulling her in close and wrapping an arm around her, restraining her. She struggles, but can’t get free of his grip.

Thousands of lives. Both those in the slums and up on the plate. Shinra’s cold-blooded calculus enrages Aerith, but she still can’t fight back. 

Barret appeals to Reno again, this time at the point of his gun arm, aimed at Reno’s chest. “How are you gonna live with yourself, knowing you personally killed my daughter, who never hurt anyone? How you gonna live with that evil, you piece of shit?”

Reno flinches slightly, but shrugs again. “Whiskey and women, my terrorist friend.”

Barret shoots at him, heedless of anything else. Reno ducks and dodges away, faster than Aerith can even track, and the spray of bullets sends sparks flying from the pillar controls. Barret’s scream of rage fuels Aerith. While Barret tries and fails to shoot at Reno, Aerith lifts her heavy boot and brings it down solidly on Rude’s foot. He grunts and his hold loosens on her. She throws an elbow back indiscriminately, and he shoves her away to avoid the worst of the impact. She spins as she twists away, turning his hand holding the satchel strap at an awkward angle. Not willing to put himself at a disadvantage to hold the bag, he releases it and dances back, grunting at her maneuver.

She immediately reaches in for the lightning materia. They can take on Rude together, but Reno’s too fast. She whirls in place, eyes alighting on the charging form of Reno, lightning baton sparking, glee glinting off his eyes. Why are the pretty ones always the most problematic?

She focuses her will on the materia, and a bolt of lightning arcs out, overloading the baton and zapping Reno with its unexpected discharge. He flings away from his trajectory and collides with the controls. Barret, realizing what she’s done, twists his gun arm over to Rude and begins shooting, providing her cover to take the pretty boy out.

She scoops up her staff, and points it menacingly at Reno, who coughs and holds his smoking chest while gunfire and impacts sound from behind her. Barret and Rude throw down, and Aerith glances at the screen. The monitor displays the self destruct confirmation, and it requires a high level Shinra password to confirm or abort.

“What’s the code to stop it?” Aerith demands.

Reno shrugs, coughing, and working his way up into a crouch. “Lucky shot.”

“Once is lucky, twice is coincidence. Wanna go for three and really hurt your feelings?”

He scoffs, but doesn’t immediately retort. She asks again, “How do we stop this?”

“You don’t,” Rude’s voice whispers from directly behind her. Her eyes widen in panic as she spins to confront the man, but already he’s kneeing her in the stomach, stealing her breath. She holds out the lightning materia, intending to flail out with the magic and take out whoever she can, but Rude pummels her with an open-palm technique to the chest that shoves her back and over. She lands with a hard thud, stars in her blackening vision, and just barely manages to hold the staff and materia.

She catches a glimpse of Barret unconscious on the ground, and struggles against losing it herself. The rest happens in a daze. Reno stands and plugs in the code, and with a big shit-eating grin slams the activation button. Rude calls for evac while Aerith struggles to get upright again. Avalanche failed. 

Aerith holds the materia out, struggling to draw breath into her body. If she’s going to die in this moment, she’s going to do it fighting, not laying down while her city is destroyed under false pretenses. Reno grabs Rude’s shoulder as a helicopter raises into view near the edge of the platform. Klaxons ring out, red lights flash. It’s a noisome fury.

Rude shrugs the shoulder off and steps towards Aerith. They’re going to take her. All this running and fighting will have been for nothing.

She prays to the planet, asking for the strength to stop these men. And for once, it seems, the planet listens. Lightning arcs all around her, thunder booming. Rude steps back from the electric blue radius that crackles all around Aerith.

If they come near her, she will fry their brains. Cook their hearts in their chests until the physical matches the blackened ruin of their souls. The pillar will break, the plate will fall, and they’ll already be dead.

Reno grabs Rude again, nods to the pillar controls, where a minute long timer has begun to tick down. A minute of life. A minute to evacuate. She hopes Wedge and the rest of Sector 7 took it seriously. She hopes they fled.

Biggs and Jessie are somewhere below. Are they still alive? Did they retreat?

She just doesn’t know, and in the moment, she doesn’t care about anything but stopping these Turks from doing any more harm.

But the pair of them glance at the countdown, at each other, and then at Aerith, before they both shrug. “The boss doesn’t need to know about this, does he?” Reno asks.

Rude nods. “If she lives, we can deal with her later.”

Reno's lips curl up into his cocky, smarmy smile, and they dash away from her, from their inevitable deaths. In a matter of seconds, they’re in the helicopter, flying away to safety, while the timer ticks down second by second. 

She draws a breath, letting the crackling energies fade, feeling worn out and spent. With under a minute to go, they have nowhere to escape. She hobbles over to Barret, who stirs and begins to wake after the cooling energies of her cure materia waft through him, invigorating him. She does the same to herself, if only to stop the ache in her chest where Rude drove his palm into it.

“We lost,” Aerith says, dropping to her knees. Half a minute.

Barret gathers himself, curses for a solid five seconds, then glances around. “We can tally our losses after we’re still alive to do it,” he says. And yanks her to the edge of the platform, where she’s afraid he’s going to just throw themselves over, to plummet to their deaths.

The last thing she remembers is being swept up into his gigantic, sweaty arms. Then it all evaporates in the concussive force of a pillar exploding, and a plate falling. She can hear the planet cry out its fury and sorrow, and it sounds like a dragon mourning the loss of its egg.

*****

 _Earlier_.

Hours have passed. Tifa has no idea how long she’s been strapped to this table. How long still until Corneo comes to gloat again, how long until he does to her what he’s done to countless girls before her. Struggling doesn’t work. She’s lost the will to resist, lost the energy to keep working at her bonds, and now she rests. Gathers her energies to her. She can still get free, can still warn Sector 7. She just needs a minute to rest.

But before she can go back to struggling, it happens. At first there’s a light rumble that shakes the room, swinging the lights, like an earthquake. Then a sound and fury follows that will haunt Tifa every day of her life, however long that ends up being. The room quakes. The stones in the walls shudder. A sustained rumble and boom follows. The plate falls. Though she can’t hear them, she imagines the screams. Her bar crashing under the rubble. Barret, and Marlene, and everyone else she knows and loves. Wondering what happened to Tifa right up until the sky fell. Dust shakes loose from the ceiling, and she blinks back tears against the onslaught. Tifa stares, eyes streaming. She blames herself for this failure. For not acting on her instincts fast enough to prevent getting caught.

For failing an entire Sector of the city. Never again. First she is going to free herself. Then she’s going to end him. Then she’s going to end everything and everyone that led to this moment.

The plate falls. The chains rattle. The jaunty music keeps on playing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Chapter: Tifa Punches People. A Lot. A lot of punches on a lot of people.


	4. Eruption

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barret and Aerith decide what to do after platefall.
> 
> Tifa pummels her way to freedom.
> 
> **TAG NOTES** This chapter contains graphic descriptions of physical violence and death, and suggestive non-con intentions. There is no actual non-con, however. **TAG NOTES**

The sounds of the plate falling never seem to stop. Crying children, wailing adults, the planet itself weeping, or so Barret would recall. Explosions, and twisting metal, and collapsing buildings. The upper plate hangs askew, large sections completely cratered. Anything underneath the plate is a pyre or a pile.

Aerith and Barret swung to freedom and life like some kind of mythic heroes, using a cable attached to the pillar support structure. They can’t stop even when they skid and roll upon landing, outside the gates between Sectors 6 and 7. They run, dodging raining debris, catching up with others also fleeing.

And then, when all is quiet once more, Barret gives in and weeps. Not for anyone in particular. Not for his daughter, or his trusted friends in Avalanche. He cries because he knows there is no beating an enemy who would murder thousands just to deal with an inconvenience.

Won’t stop him, though, oh no. He gets it out of his system, already thinking about backup plans and contingencies. Where Wedge would take his daughter, and the others would regroup. Where the resistance would go on.

Aerith lays a hand on his shoulder while he kneels in the dirt. “Do you know where to start, to find Marlene?” she asks. “We can go back to my home in Sector 5 if not.”

He nods. “There’s a place, I think you’re already familiar with it. Heard you and Biggs talk about it.” Biggs. He and Jessie were up there when the plate fell. Barret tried to look for them on the way down, but there was too much chaos.

“I’m sure they made it out,” Aerith says, offering a hand to him. Cute that she thinks she can help him stand when she’s a quarter of his weight. He takes it, though, and stands.

“‘Course they did. Wedge would never let anything happen to my daughter, or his cats. Biggs always has a backup. And that Jessie’s got more lives than she has… had roommates.”

Aerith smiles at the bad joke. “So Sector 5, then?”

“Nothing else we can really do just yet.”

Aerith nods, and then frowns. “What about your friend, the one at Wall Market?” The one you can’t stop asking about, Barret thinks. 

“Tifa can handle herself for a little while. She’s probably out of her mind with the plate falling, but we gotta handle what we can handle.”

“Sure. I’m sure you’re right. I just worry about women going into that place without knowing what they’re getting into.”

“Regrouping includes our wayward spy, kid.”

“I’m not a kid.”

He nods. “Maybe not. You climbed that tower, fought the Turks.”

“Maybe I’m a SOLDIER,” she jokes.

He chuckles. “Nah, but you’re something, all right. I was out of it, but they wanted you for a different reason, huh? Anything to do with how that materia responded to you like I’ve never seen before?”

She shrugs. “Maybe.”

“And I know I was a little unconscious, but I swear I heard one of ‘em say something about the Ancients.”

She falls silent, and he grins. “I’m not prying. Come on, let’s find our people.”

And this strange girl nods, happy to let the conversation redirect to something less accusatory.

With any luck, they’ll find their people. He’ll find his daughter. He can’t let any other possibility inside his heart. 

Don Corneo adjusts his pants as he wipes his mouth. His heart beats fast as the adrenaline high of watching thousands die courses through him. With Shinra’s resources and his connections, he is unstoppable. Even the mild terror he experienced as the debris fell far too close to home for comfort is just exhilarating now. 

Once the rumbles fade and the sparks settle, and the screams become moans of horror at their new realities, Don Corneo is ready for his bride. “I’m going to freshen up a little before the evening’s festivities,” he says to Kotch, whom he is mildly amused to see thinks this display of power and cruelty is a bit much, if his frown of discontent is any indicator.

But Kotch is steady. He’ll get over it or he’ll shut up, and it’s all the same to Corneo. “Of course, Don. Would you like her prepared for you?”

“Prepared?” It takes him a moment to realize what Kotch means, and then he giggles and shakes his head. “Why, that’s the fun part with a feisty girl like Miss Tifa. No, I expect I won’t need you again tonight.”

“We serve at the Don’s pleasure,” Kotch says, and backs out of the balcony, leaving Don Corneo alone with his thoughts.

Soon enough, Shinra will let him operate somewhere less filthy. They made him promises. And a lion always gets what he’s promised.

Don Corneo laughs to himself while he saunters through his pagoda, his spire of passion. All the while working himself up to a lather thinking about what’s to come tonight. What he’s going to do to her… to make her do to him… to break her like a stubborn chocobo.

Yes, this is going to be a special night.

He bobs his head to the jaunty music coming from the jukebox as he makes his belabored way down the stone steps of his pleasure chamber. Sure, others may call it a torture room, but it exists for his pleasure, and therefore it’s the pleasure chamber. Even walking down the steps, Corneo wheezes slightly as he reaches the bottom, and briefly considers that he should have an elevator put in as he pushes the heavy door open, looking down while he reaches for the buckle on his belt.

The rattle of chains behind him is the only warning he receives. In a flash of panic, he sees the table is empty as the chains flip over his head and close on his neck. He gets one hand up as the chain crushes in on his throat, and then fights for his life.

This bitch, this utterly stubborn bitch! He splutters and yanks on the chain, but Tifa forces her knee into his back, holding him in place as he struggles. He drops to his knees, trying to get leverage, and she just tightens the grip until the bones of his fingers snap. His eyes bulge out, and spittle flies from his lips as the life is choking from him.

In a moment of blind, panicked inspiration, Don Corneo struggles back to his feet and lunges his heavy body backwards. The sudden loosening of chain gives him a chance to suck in a great breath. He cries out, “Guards!”

Tifa curses. His backward momentum throws her off-balance, and to avoid being crushed against a wall, she dodges left into the center of the room, losing all leverage with the chain. Her eyes are bottomless black pits of rage, and she snarls as he tumbles backwards through the open door, toward the stairs.

Already Scotch and two others come rushing to his defense. Scotch puts his sunglasses away and cracks his knuckles as he stands in front of Corneo. Tifa drops into a defensive stance.

“Show this bitch who’s boss,” Don Corneo wheezes, struggling to his feet and running up the steps. He’ll let his lackeys take care of business, and then he’ll come back.

“Get out of my WAY!” he hears Tifa yell as he shuffles up the steps, to safety, to freedom. Sounds of fighting commence. At the top of the steps, more of his guards stand at attention.

He snarls, “Shoot the whore if she makes it this far. Call the rest in just to be safe.” 

“Yes, Don!” They bow at him after the Wutai fashion, and a flurry of activity follows the Don. Guns cock, knuckles crack, his army laughs.

Don Corneo retreats into his bedroom and locks the door before hiding behind the gold statue near his bed. In his good hand he grips his gold-plated pistol. He’s never fired it at a person before, but he knows it blows holes in the thickest armor, and she might as well be naked in that kimono.

The bitch. The rutting, filthy whore. 

And yet, despite the near miss, he’s excited. Breaking Tifa Lockhart will be all the sweeter now that she’s tasted freedom and had it ripped away.

Only a matter of time.

The monster in the guise of a man vanishes up the steps, and Tifa tries to give chase, but Scotch and the two lackeys get in her way. She’s weaker than she wants to admit, and her muscles hurt from the stress of ripping those chains out of the table, but she’s got the rage of Sector 7 burning inside her.

“Get out of my WAY!” she yells, charging at the group.

One of the lackeys, a bulkier man in a leather vest, grins and throws a lazy punch at her. Underestimating her. That’s the last time any of them will make that mistake.

She dodges under it, whipping the chain up and around the arm in one fluid motion, then uses his own momentum against him to yank him off his feet. The others laugh at their friend’s mishap, and Tifa drives the thick heel into the man’s wrist, shattering the bones within. His scream is satisfying, a precursor to what she’ll extract from Corneo. The pig.

Tifa dodges back from the other two once they realize she’s actually going to be trouble. Every second she’s down here with these goons is another second the Don prepares for her upstairs. Or gets away. Her nerves scream out for vengeance even as they help their friend to his feet while he cradles his shattered wrist. She slips off the useless heels, wishing for her good ass-kicking boots.

“A broken bone for a second,” she says.

“Lucky shot,” Scotch shoots back.

“No. You’re not getting it. For every second you hold me up, I will snap another bone.”

“You’re not getting up these steps, feisty bitch,” Scotch says, but she can see the sweat. He’s not so sure now.

She starts counting seconds out loud, and then rushes forward, catching them off-guard. She jumps at the big man with the leather vest, but feints in midair towards the smaller lackey. He brings his arms up to block the kick, and she feels the snap as much as hears it, as both radius and ulna splinter, bending the arm at an impossible angle.

Using the momentum of him holding his ground, she follows the kick with a roundhouse to his jaw while throwing the heavy chain at Scotch. He ducks the lazy throw, which gives her the distraction she hoped for while teeth scatter and blood spatters. The smaller lackey drops to the ground, unconscious and bleeding.

One down.

She starts counting again, and Scotch pushes the big man in the leather vest forward. Together they rush her, and she pulls back in a defensive posture until one of them makes the first move. She twists and rolls along the outside of Scotch’s clumsy grapple attempt, knees him in the stomach and forces him between her and the big lackey.

The big guy surprises them, though, by just tackling both of them. Tifa panics, tangled up with Scotch and being pushed to the wall; she wriggles loose with a strong leap upwards. She drives her knee into Scotch’s forehead on the way up, which screams pain but is far more punishing to the forehead than it is to her.

Momentarily above the fight, she twists in the air and angles for the big man while Scotch drops to the ground, clutching his face. She lands on the big guy’s shoulders, straddling his head with her legs, while he’s looking around confused. Before he can fight back, she chops at the exposed part of his neck, causing him to double over gasping. Tifa boxes the soft pads of his ears for good measure as she rolls backwards off him while he tumbles forward.

He just manages to stop himself before falling on Scotch, and she recovers as both of them stand back up, bleeding, injured, but still ready to fight. Tifa, aware that time is wasting away while she messes with these underlings, makes a brash decision. 

She feints a roundhouse to throw them off, and spins into a crouch while sweeping her leg out to trip up Scotch. His legs give out beneath him and he tumbles to the ground while the leather vest goon swings one big meaty fist at her. 

Tifa, wary of even one strike from him, continues the momentum from her leg sweep into a roll, coming up under his fist. She thinks briefly of her mentor, Zangan, who always told her not to do anything silly and flashy when something simple would do the trick.

Well, she’s put herself into a bad position, and sometimes the flashy move is all you have left.

She reaches up and grabs his shoulders, using the man for leverage. She rocks back and rotates upward, letting her momentum carry her leg upward in a tight arc. It slides up the man’s body, heel connecting with jaw in a satisfying crash, and drops him in a splashy arc onto Scotch, who collapses under the weight and can’t get back out.

With the three of them handled, and her body aching from hard use, she grabs the chains from their pile on the ground and sprints up the steps, wary of what awaits her at the top. She didn’t see any guns on the way in, but any bodyguard outfit is going to have a rifle or two.

Fortunately, this path doesn’t seem to have a lock on the door. Though the chains make a little bit of noise, her feet are silent as she climbs. She could play this safe and hope Don Corneo hasn’t already fled, but she’s gotta use this adrenaline while it lasts. Use this rage.

Get the bastard.

She shoulder checks the door open at the top of the steps, taking in her surroundings of an opulent office filled to bursting with Corneo lackeys, several of whom are aiming at the door with pistols and a machine gun.

She wildly throws the chains at the guy with the machine gun while diving and sliding across the slick, polished floor towards one of the guys with a pistol, who is standing next to a fancy structural pillar. They all open fire, but she is too fast, takes them by surprise. Chaos and confusion reign. One guy gets shot by the machine gun guy and he drops, screaming.

She kicks out while her slide is still strong, thwacking the gun out of the guy’s hand. While he recovers from this surprise, she digs her other foot into his leg, uses that as leverage to roll up into an uppercut to the guy’s groin. He wheezes, veins popping all over his face, as the force actually lifts him from the ground, so that most of his mass clears the desk. Behind the desk is the guy with the machine gun, so she leaps up to use his body as cover, and presses her back to the ornate, golden pillar while she piston kicks with both legs. The lackey topples over the desk, pelted with bullets while colliding with the machine gun guy. They both tumble out of sight, and Tifa drops into a crouch.

There are at least four still up in this room, and she can hear more on the way. Shouts and yells, calls to action. Boots pounding marble steps.

She quickly dodge rolls over to the desk, barely avoiding pistol fire. She wishes she had clocked where the pistol went when she kicked it from the lackey’s hand, but there was too much going on. With reinforcements on the way, she can’t hesitate, and with the four of them in this room between her and Don Corneo, and the rest coming from behind, she’ll be full of holes before she can blink if she doesn’t act now.

One more grunt with a gun. The machine gun guy is down but not out, and if any one of them recovers a gun, and she doesn’t know about it, she’s toast.

She reaches a quick hand out above the desk, grabbing for anything, and comes back with a heavy paperweight, a crystal orb with a tiny depiction of Corneo’s pagoda inside. If she didn’t need a weapon right now, she’d smash this fucking thing.

She risks a quick glance above the desk and drops back down as the guy with the pistol shoots wildly at her.

But it’s enough. Two pillars with ornate room-dividing screens between the outside of the pillars and the walls. Behind one pillar is the guy with the pistol. Two more are helping the machine gun guy get out from under the now dead body of their companion.

Tifa chucks the paperweight at the guy behind the pillar, knowing she won’t take him out or even hurt him, but she needs to get back there and this is the only distraction she has right now.

The moment she throws it, she sprints out from behind the desk, charging for the pillar. Only her aim is off and the paperweight smashes against the wall harmlessly, not even cause for distraction, and she stares at a grinning guard who draws line of sight on her. Aiming low, ready for her to roll or slide like she’s already done.

Instead, she leaps back and to the side, aiming for the corner of the desk. The bullet passes through the space she just vacated, and her feet land on the corner of the desk while he moves the gun over. She launches forward like a drill, spinning in the air, and torpedo tackles the guy behind the pillar. He makes a sound of guttural surprise as they collapse into a pile, but manages to hold onto the gun. Instead of trying to shoot her, he uses it like a bludgeon and racks her in the back with it. Pain explodes and she elbows him in the chest, then uses her legs to wrap up his gun arm, twisting until it snaps and the gun falls away. He screams, but she doesn’t let up, bringing a right cross pounding into his face. The split of lip and splatter of blood are immensely satisfying..

He drops unconscious, but she has no time to savor it. The machine gun lackey has been freed and points the gun at her. She grabs the unconscious body in front of her as cover, and throws herself back behind the pillar and the dividing screen. Meaty bullet wounds appear as the unconscious lackey becomes a dead lackey. The screen isn’t going to do more than provide a little bit of uncertainty to her position, but it’s all she has now. A flash of memory at all this carnage, a sword through her gut. She shakes it off, no time for bad memories.

She glances around for the pistol she knocked away, but it’s also out of reach. Tifa scrambles back to the corner, where there are supplies stacked up. She’s trapped in a killhole if any of them think to press the advantage.

Instead of waiting for the machine gun guy to get brave, she lifts the entire room-dividing screen and runs with it around the pillar, obscuring her exact location while she collides with the remaining guards.

The screen’s flimsy fabric rips as people get tangled up in it, and one of the goons pops through a frame of the screen entirely as it clatters to the ground. 

Tifa uses this moment of surprise to lay into him. A series of hooks and jabs to the soft flesh of his stomach, which turns out to be not so soft. He flexes and grabs her, shouting, “I got the bitch, shoot her!”

The guy with the machine gun finally rips through the fabric of the screen that collided with him, and draws aim down on both of them. The guy who managed to grab her realizes his error as Tifa’s body slips free from the sheen of sweat she’s worked up. It’s ruining this wonderful black kimono, but it was already going to be worthless after all the blood and spittle she’s grinding into it.

She drops as the machine gun fires a spray of bullets across the man, and more blood spatters out. He manages to look both ashamed and shocked at this turn of events.

Tifa grabs the man and rolls backward with him, over the tattered screen, and launches the dying man through the air to collide with the machine gun guy. They collide, and both crunch against the nearby pillar, which cracks from the impact. The machine gun fires indiscriminately at the ground, ricocheting bullets harmlessly around the room, before he falls unconscious from the blow to his head against the pillar.

Tifa, rolling to a crouched position, stares around. One more guard, and this guy is reaching for a gun on the ground in front of the door she suspects Don Corneo to be behind. He grabs for the gun and fumbles it a bit while she launches up from her crouch. She charges the man as he gets hold of the gun and raises it up in a wide arc to shoot her. She gets to him first, jumps into his chest with both feet and kicks off.

She flips from the impact to land in a defensive posture while he jolts backwards. The force with which she kicked him literally rips the door from its hinge as he stumbles backwards, attempting to keep his legs under him.

Everything happens in a blur. The doors behind Tifa burst open, and Kotch stands there with several more guards, all carrying machine guns. Tifa sprints for the open doorway to Don Corneo’s private chambers just as they yell at her to stand down. Tifa clears the threshold before Kotch and the others open fire. The man she kicked through the door stumbles backwards another step or two, then as it looks like he’s going to recover, ear-shattering blasts erupt from the corner of the room, ripping huge holes in the man.

Tifa dodges around the dying man, landing on a carpet in the center of the room, which rings tinny and curiously hollow under her feet. The carpet is next to the disgustingly opulent bed Corneo hides behind.

He grins suddenly, and reaches for what she took to be just an arm of a statue, careful of his twisted and broken fingers.

She throws caution to the wind and leaps onto the bed, just as the trap door Corneo activates drops out from under her. The shot man falls into it, already too weak to cry out. She hits the surprisingly soft mattress and struggles to gain a foothold to get to the man she wants to end.

So she throws a pillow at him, which erupts in a shower of feathers when he shoots at her through it. Her ears ring, and the bullet whips past her head so close she swears she can feel it, and explodes a huge chunk of brass bedframe behind her.

No time to waste. Tifa gets hold of Don Corneo’s hand holding the gun, and smashes it against the golden statue. Bones crack and he cries out, dropping the huge gold-plated monstrosity. She rolls off the bed while leveraging herself with his shattered hand, keeping him off-balance, and sucker punches him with her free hand as she comes down beside him.

All the wind rushes out of him in a whoosh of decaying gums, and she manages to wrap an arm around his throat while he struggles. And she squeezes.

She drags him out into the open, so he can’t use anything against her, and knocks him to his knees while still squeezing his neck. Kotch and the others rush into the room, weapons held low, and he holds a hand up to keep them from doing anything.

They are at a standstill, while Don Corneo’s pudgy body drains of life before them.His piggy eyes beg his lieutenant to help, to shoot her, but Kotch hesitates.

He holds a hand up in peace, and says, “You kill the boss, you won’t make it out of this room alive.”

“That’s not the right threat,” Tifa hisses through clenched teeth. “I took out nine men to get to him, and some of them had guns.” She counts the ones that got shot through no effort on her part. They won’t know the difference. 

Corneo struggles and thick, dirty fingernails drag across her arm, ripping flesh and causing her to wince, but she holds tight. No one’s stopping this. Not for this piece of shit.

“Well,  _ all  _ of us have guns,” Kotch says, but she can tell they’re not convinced. 

“I’ll make sure you’re buried with them.” She squeezes tighter on Corneo’s neck, so tight she can hear his windpipe straining. A little more and it’ll collapse, and no one in this room could save him then.

Kotch and the others glance among themselves, clearly doing their own selfish math. If the boss dies, the gravy train dies with it. If they can’t kill her, they also die with him. The bodies in the room tell their own compelling tale.

Corneo’s struggles falter, and he droops, losing consciousness. Tifa hisses, “Save the boss, or save yourselves.”

Leslie comes rushing up behind Kotch and the others, just as the last dregs of consciousness fall away from Corneo. “Let him go, Tifa,” he says, almost pleads, fear in his eyes.

“You have pity for this man?” she yells. “You want mercy for what he is? For what he did to Sector 7? For what he was going to do to me?”

“No, listen,” Leslie pleads. “He’s got information we need. You think we all do what he wants because we’re as bad as him?”

Tifa nods. She isn’t sure what these men can say that will get her to let Corneo live, if he can even be revived at this point. “You let it go on. Kotch, you cleaned me up despite knowing what he was going to do to me, to my home. Our home.”

Kotch looks away, some kind of shame on his frowning face. “Yeah, well, I never said I was a saint.”

“None of us are, Tifa,” Leslie says, taking a step closer. “But we did what he wanted because he took something from us, too.”

“Whatever he took, you let him. You got fat and greedy on his lust.  _ You let it all happen. _ ”

She releases Don Corneo’s limp body, and before it falls to the ground, she spin kicks it at the trap door that’s still open in the center of the room. The body thuds against the side of the pit before disappearing into darkness. There is no scream, no thud or splash that greets her.

Leslie cries out “No!” as he reaches for the body in vain. Everyone else in the room is too shocked to take advantage of Tifa’s vulnerability. 

She pants, wipes sweat from her face. Stares at Kotch and the others. They’re not drawing on her, not firing. Not running away, either. And what Leslie says makes sense to her now that the Don is dead. Maybe they’re not all bad. Maybe some actually were forced into this life.

“Corneo ran Wall Market and supplied Shinra with intel,” she says, working it through.

Kotch nods, then shakes his head no, while Leslie extends the ladder in the side of the trap door into the darkness. “He… he would tell you he ran all of it, but I think Andrea might have more control than anyone thinks.”

Andrea is one of the Trio she learned about when preparing to go on this mission. The ones who supply Corneo with his brides. Chocobo Sam is another and she needs to have a chat with him. She nods. “Are the Trio as dangerous as Corneo, or as stupid?”

Leslie vanishes down the ladder without another word, panicked at the thought that Corneo is dead. Kotch shrugs, “I don’t know.”

One of the other lackeys grunts. “Can’t believe the boss is dead.”

“Believe it,” Tifa says. Her heart feels hard. This was supposed to be a simple mission: get in, interrogate the Don, get back to her people. Now her people are probably dead. Avalanche is gone. Bringing it down from the top was never going to work. She sees that now.

Corruption from within, at every level. You can’t ask a corrupt government to play nice. There’s no incentive. You can only force it. And you can’t force it if there’s no repercussions.

Tifa says, “Corneo worked for Shinra. The Trio work at the pleasure of the Don. What else does the Don provide to Shinra?”

Kotch runs off a list: “Booze, drugs, contraband, women, the occasional man. It’s a long list.”

Ideas are forming. Thoughts she can’t believe she’s having. There is no way to salvage an organization as corrupt as one that is willing to destroy an entire sector of the city just to prove a point. To kill thousands in cold blood. The entire thing must be dismantled. Destroyed from the ground up. 

Shinra must be subject to an Eruption from within.

“If you’re not going to shoot me,” Tifa says, “then you should go recover that rat’s body with Leslie.”

Kotch and the others glance at each other again, and back at her. Kotch nods. “Yes, Miss Tifa.”

Tifa stands up straight, adjusts her bloody kimono, and lets her hair down. Hard hearts have no friends. Leaders have no peers. Those who do what is right, what is necessary, must be willing to sacrifice everything. She has nothing left to sacrifice. Nothing that hasn’t already been stolen from her. 

She says, “Send someone to get rid of the trash in the dungeon as well. Oh, and I expect you to address me properly.” Kotch hesitates as the other men with him begin to descend the ladder, rifles slung over their backs. Following orders.

Kotch bows and says, “Of course. My apologies, Donna Lockhart.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is later than I'd hoped, but writing is difficult right now! 
> 
> Also, if you're upset about the sudden and violent shift in Tifa's behavior and demeanor from what you're used to and were maybe expecting, please bear with it! She's been through a lot in a short amount of time, but Donna Lockhart is not the end of her progression. If you liked everything up to this point, I hope you stick around through what's next. =)


	5. Five Conversations to a New You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The subordinates and employees of Don Corneo sit down to interviews by their new boss, Donna Lockhart. The results may vary.

Kotch wipes sweat from his brow and adjusts his mohawk, removes his sunglasses. It’s been a few hours since they sent in the cleaning crew, and Kotch doesn’t know what he’s about to find when he goes into the Don’s--Donna’s office. But he’s been summoned, and he’s already committed himself to this, for better or worse.

He pushes open the big double doors, chased in gold and immaculate on this side. On the other side, when he pushes them closed, there are bullet holes, shattered wood, splintered gold. This room may be free of the carnage, but it’ll take time to clear it of the coup. She’s not here yet and he sighs with relief. Everywhere there are signs of the recent battle. Darker stained flooring where the blood wouldn’t come up. Shattered pieces of furniture shuffled off to the corners of the room. Scuff marks where the big desk was pushed around during the fight. And everywhere, like with the doors, bullet holes. That, if nothing else, proves she deserves to be here. She freed herself, fought through experienced guards and ex-military, through height and weight, through weapons and guns, and came out on top like some kind of Wutai legend.

Scotch enters the room from the dungeons, followed by Donna Lockhart in a new kimono she found among the Don’s belongings. Now that he knows what she’s capable of, it doesn’t suit her, this red and orange formalwear. Scotch has been bandaged up from his defeat, and true to her word, Tifa is letting him go his own way. Kotch’s former partner in crime grins at him and waves. She goes to stand behind her desk, giving Kotch a moment with his friend.

Scotch says, “I guess the band had to break up at some point, right, brother?”

Kotch sighs. “I guess so. Least you’re alive.”

“Looks like Trouble’s gonna be my middle name and you…” He glances at Tifa. “You’re gonna be causing a whole different kind of trouble, I think.”

“Maybe.” Kotch leans in to his former partner and whispers, “I don’t know what she’s planning, but I’m curious.”

“You always had a soft spot for the soft girls.” Scotch pulls open the battered door and gives a mock salute to Donna Lockhart. “No hard feelings, eh, Miss Tifa?”

Kotch hears her sharp intake of breath from her, sees the moment of panic in her eyes before it vanishes under hard scrutiny. “You’re not out of the building yet, Scotch.”

“Of course, of course. No hard feelings, _Donna Lockhart_.”

“I want to make one thing very clear,” she says from her position behind her desk. “Wall Market is not for you anymore. Find another den.”

“Oh, I will. I hear Sector 2’s got a nice gambling hall. Until we meet again, Donna.”

He leaves, and Kotch leans his head out the door to the guards downstairs. “Make sure he doesn’t take anything on his way out.”

Scotch looks back at Kotch, almost wounded, but grins again. “Go lick the new boots, old pal.”

Kotch averts his eyes and closes the doors as he steps back inside. His friend and partner in crime, gone. Off to make new connections and probably get himself killed with his attitude. He sighs and turns back to Donna Lockhart.

“My apologies for his behavior, Donna. He’ll be out of our hair soon enough.”

“He’s of no consequence, Kotch. Pull up a seat, we need to chat.”

Kotch glances around to the ruined furniture in the room and grabs an ornate, only slightly damaged bench from one wall, sets it a few feet back from the fancy desk in the center of the big room, and goes to sit down before he realizes Tifa is still standing. He stops, and waits for her. 

She doesn’t sit immediately, and then her eyes narrow slightly as she gets the picture. She sits down, crossing her legs lazily, and gestures to the bench. Kotch nods graciously and sits.

She doesn’t say anything at first, and Kotch isn’t sure she knows what she wants to ask. Knows what she needs to learn. He saw her at her worst, chained to a table in a dungeon, begging for help. It suddenly makes sense that she starts by talking to him. Kotch knows her better than anyone right now.

“Donna,” he begins, “we’ll need some time to get this room fixed up right. These boards will have to be replaced, the metalwork repaired. We’ll get a fine craftsman from topside down here.”

“That’s good,” she says. “I think, though, I’d like the doors to remain as they are.”

He follows her gaze back to the ruined doors at the entrance. “Why?”

“I ran a bar in--” She cuts off, voice choking a bit, but she muscles through it. “--I ran a bar before this. The first thing you learn, after where to kick a man to take him down quickly, is that it doesn’t matter how nice or rundown a place is. What matters is the door and the impression it gives. That keeps a man in line, seeing a door with a little damage.” She doesn’t explain any further, and Kotch stares at her, mystified.

He nods, though. “Of course, Donna. We will not have the doors repaired.”

She leans forward now, attentive, and to Kotch’s eyes it seems as though she’s attempting to be confident and cocky, but she’s not doing a very good job. The kimono doesn’t help. The uncertainty in her eyes is worst of all, though.

He continues, “We also had the bodies disposed of in the sewers.”

Tifa shudders before she says, “I didn’t kill any of them, I hope you know.”

He nods, though he disagrees with that assessment. Putting a living man in front of a bullet meant for you is definitely you killing them, but it wouldn’t do any good belaboring that point right now. “Other people pulled the triggers, of course.”

She nods curtly, then leans back in the big chair again. It’s too big for her, and where with Don Corneo that size accentuated his own meaty grandeur, it gives the impression that she’s a child playing at crime boss with just how big it is compared to her. Kotch makes a note to have the chair replaced with something more appropriate. There’s more than enough imported Wutai furniture here to make do.

“Can I ask you a question, Donna?” She nods. “I know you’re not going to keep the operation going the way it was before. No more nightly brides, no more desperate women. What are you planning on doing with the Wall Market?”

Tifa shrugs. “Who says anything is going to change?”

Kotch doesn’t know what to say to that. “I--Donna Lockhart, do you want me to bring you some entertainment?”

Tifa says, “I need to know more about my predecessor’s operations. Who answers to him, who he answers to, how often, where the money comes from. I need to see the books, Kotch.”

Kotch nods, feeling whiplash from the conversational pivot. “I can have that information brought to you. Leslie knows more about the nitty gritty details, though. I mostly just run the arena and--and deliver the girls.”

“I will ask him when I talk to him next. He’s still in the sewers looking for Corneo’s body. Tell me about the fights, then.”

He does, though there isn’t much to it. Structured fights that are generally unfair to the challengers, with champions brought by the powerful in Wall Market and elsewhere. Most tournaments are among the Trio, and they make a good bit of side money. Chocobo Sam is one of the Trio, along with Madam M and Andrea, and Kotch sees she’s making mental notes that these people must be interviewed as well.

He says, “We normally do a Corneo Cup to cap the week’s bouts. I can’t imagine a better way to announce your… promotion, than running a Lockhart Cup.”

She shakes her head, though. “I’m not ready for that exposure. You will find a replacement announcer for Scotch, and continue to run the fights. The Corneo Cup will continue as normal. No one beyond us and the Trio needs to know he’s dead just yet.”

Kotch nods. Nothing changes, then. Not really. His heart drops a little. He had been looking forward to whatever new day this was supposed to be, but if she falls into all of Corneo’s bad habits and criminal enterprises, he still won’t sleep well at night.

“Donna Lockhart, if I might ask another question?” Another nod. “Are you going to be a tyrant like Corneo?”

Her hesitance and demeanor suddenly shift into outrage. “I will be nothing like that garbage heap. And I will never subject a woman to the horrors he got off on.” Her hands clench the armrests on the chair so hard that the wood creaks and groans. 

She says, “I don’t know how to be a crime boss, but I can tell you that I know how to run a discreet business, and I know how to kick some ass. To the outside world, nothing is going to change. To Corneo’s contacts at Shinra, nothing is going to change. It’s very important that people think business as usual is business as usual.”

“And for those of us on the inside?” Kotch asks, hope returning.

“We’re going to cause a little mayhem for the people who destroyed Sector 7. Our home will be avenged, Kotch.”

He nods, feelings goosebumps all over his skin and that weird feeling you get that spreads out from your chest into every part of your body when something truly profound hits you. He becomes something else in that instant, more than a petty thief, more than a common criminal, more than a crime boss’s lieutenant. Donna Lockhart is a woman with a wish, and that wish is justice. He stands and bows to her.

“I will bring you anything you need, Donna. Anything at all.” She’s not the Donna she needs to be. Not yet. But Kotch is ready to help her get there.

She sits back in her chair, a relieved and pleased smile on her face. “I need something from the dungeon while I wait for Leslie.”

Leslie Kyle begins to climb out of the sewer and he’s not happy about it. The only evidence of Corneo he could find was a scrap of his big red robe, hanging out of the mouth of the giant sewer beast he kept as a disposal unit. The beast fled through a sewer tunnel, recently created by the terrible destruction of Sector 7. Leslie can’t think about any of that right now. He’s got to figure out what to do about Corneo and the things he held over Leslie’s head.

But now he’s at an impasse. He has no idea where the creature went, and if it ate Corneo, then Leslie might never find the information he needs. He might never find Merle.

As he climbs the ladder, though, that terrible, jaunty tune Corneo likes to play for his victims in the dungeon begins to play. Did Corneo live? Did he somehow make it from the sewers back to the mansion and get rid of the girl? 

He hustles up faster, equally hoping Corneo is alive and dead, but for different reasons.

But as he reaches the light at the top of the ladder, where the music is louder now, he hears the girl. Tifa shouts, a wordless attacking cry, and he crests the lip of the trap door just in time to see the woman who killed Don Corneo charge at the Corneo-shaped jukebox in the corner of the room, and slam into it with a knuckledust-covered fist. The resulting crunch of plastic is satisfying, and the cartoonish bulb of a head crumples inward. The jukebox tilts backward from the force, and then rocks forward again.

Leslie crawls out and watches Tifa take out her anger and frustration on this avatar of the most evil man she’s ever met. Shards of metal and plastic scatter, and eventually the music skips a beat before silencing altogether. The lights die out, and with one final punch, a feeble spark shoots out of the cratered hole in the middle of the machine before it falls silent, still, and as dead as the man himself.

She breathes heavily in a kimono that Leslie recognizes, chest hitching as she kicks it. It plunks over and she drops to the floor next to it. She wipes at her eyes as she finally realizes he’s in the room.

She sniffs back the tears while standing back up. “Heh. I got bored waiting for you to come up.”

He hesitates and edges around the trap door in the floor before tapping the arm of the statue that closes it up. “I guess now I should thank you, you took out the true monster in the room.”

She smiles, but it seems confused. “Based on your attitude when we first met, I thought you’d be happy the real one is gone, too.”

“Oh, I am. But I’m also not. He knows where my fiancee is and he’s not in the business of sharing that information, even when he’s breathing.”

“So I did you half a favor, is what you’re trying to say.” She shrugs. “Sorry.”

He shrugs right back at her and adjusts his cap. “You couldn’t know. The guy who found me down there says you took over.”

“Something like that.”

“One crime boss for another.”

“Not quite like that.” She sits on the opulent bed and then suddenly thinks better of it, standing up and rubbing her exposed fingers together like she wouldn’t mind an acid bath. “I’ll have to throw everything out of this room, won’t I?”

Leslie chuckles ruefully. “I wouldn’t really touch anything in here, no.”

“Well, that won’t be a problem, I suppose.” She removes the gloves with the knuckledusters attached, and drops them on a nearby dresser before rubbing her fingers again. “If you hated the man so much, why didn’t you kill him yourself?”

“He has--had--information. About my fiancee. About a lot of things, on almost all of us. Definitely those of us who stuck around.” He tells her about Merle, how she disappeared and only the Don knew her whereabouts. How the others have missing family, property, secrets they wished to keep from the public. Some, like Scotch and Kotch, served willingly enough, content to enjoy the cash and the castoffs.

Some, like Leslie, served in the hopes that he could find out where the Don sent Merle. Where the love of his life was sent away.

After he finishes, Tifa stares thoughtfully into the middle distance for a time. “I figured it had to be something like that, the way you talked, the way Kotch went on about it.”

“You let Kotch stay on?” Leslie asks, genuine surprise in his voice.

“He was the first to pledge new loyalty. Do you have dirt to sway my opinion on him, as well?”

Leslie scratches his head. “Not really, no. He always kinda went with the flow, did whatever people were doing. Guys like Kotch, they need a firm hand to guide them. To keep them in or out of trouble.”

She nods, a mild frown on her lips. “He spoke highly of you.”

“I doubt that. We didn’t see eye to eye.”

“He said you knew more about the intimate details of Corneo’s plans, deals, cash flow.”

“Oh, I guess I do. He and Scotch ran the arena, but I kept the books. You learn a lot about a criminal enterprise when you see where the gil goes, and where it comes back.”

“It sounds like I’m going to need you, Leslie.” She approaches him now, and his back stiffens, ready to fight back or run. “Tell me, what does your loyalty cost?”

He gapes at her. Her slightly bruised eye, her split cheek. She’s not the drop dead gorgeous woman he met earlier, but even with this battle damage, she’s something special. He almost says “nothing” and then shakes his head.

Leslie says, “I believe Corneo has secret tunnels and a warehouse somewhere in the sewers. If he’s not actually dead, that’s where he’ll have gone--”

“So you couldn’t find the body.” Her eyes widen in fury.

“We found a scrap of his robe, that’s it. But he keeps mean pets down there, too.”

“Pets don’t normally eat their masters.”

“These pets eat whatever comes their way. Maybe ‘keeping as a pet’ is generous. More like a garbage disposal.”

She searches his eyes for a lie, and he doesn’t break his gaze. She nods. “Okay. If he’s alive, he’s in his hidey hole.”

“And if he’s not, the secret bunker or warehouse or whatever is sure to have some information. If we can find that and it has what I’m looking for, I’m your man for as long as you need me.”

Tifa holds a hand out to him, and he reaches out with his own to shake. It’s a firm handshake, full of promise and warning. “Give me some time to get established, to set in motion what needs to happen, and then we’ll find this rat’s nest.”

Leslie smiles, relieved. He doesn’t know Tifa, but he doesn’t get the sense that she’s a liar. In fact he thinks she’s rather naive and gullible and that’s more trouble than being dishonest in this business.

But if she can help him find Merle… he’ll do whatever she wants, to whomever she wants.

“I look forward to it, Donna Lockhart.”

She nods approvingly. “Good.” She goes over to where her gloves are situated on the dresser, and he realizes that’s also where her black kimono has been stashed. On top of the kimono is the yellow flower she wore in her hair when arriving. Despite the abduction, the dungeon, the fighting, and everything, it looks pristine, bright, and beautiful, as though nothing can touch it. 

Her fingers caress the delicate petals of the flower. When she turns back to him, her eyes are hard and focused. “Now tell me about the Trio.”

Madam M huffs in frustration as her attendant lags behind. He hauls a portable massage table and a case full of oils and scents. It has been a long time since Corneo requested her masseuse skills personally, and that she is forced to go to him and not the other way around vexes her.

But what the Don wants, the Don gets, even in the midst of a terrorist disaster that killed their next-sector neighbors. She feels the horror of it deep in her soul, but like anyone in a position of authority, she holds herself high, reassures those she passes by, and tries to ignore the increased homeless and displaced as she carefully walks along, so that it seems she floats on a current of air.

After the plate fell, Madam M caught some whispers that there was something else happening at Corneo’s mansion, but if he’s requesting a private session--ugh--then it must have really riled him up. She made it clear in no uncertain terms that she would not personally service him ever again. That he has reneged on that--multiple times--is of no consequence. He respects that boundary more than most, and she clings to it like a child to her mother’s legs. Yet she still goes when he does call.

When she reaches the mansion, and glides up the various stairs with her attendant in tow, the atmosphere is different. The heavily perfumed air is muted. There are only a few guards, a small number in comparison to what she usually sees. The stacks of imported Wutai goods have been shuffled around, gone through. Corneo must really be in a mood. She sighs heavily as she is permitted entry. This will be terribly unpleasant.

Leslie bows graciously to her as she and her attendant come up the interior steps and approach the first room. “It’s good to see you well after the disaster, Madam.”

She accepts his bow with equanimity. This boy has always seemed rather soft to serve a man as cruel, as perverted, as Don Corneo, but the Don makes his decisions by his own internal compass, and so long as no one stops him, he can’t be stopped.

“Has the plate falling whet the Don’s appetite?” she asks. It disgusts her to say it, but she plays her part, as they all do.

“Something like that. Before you begin, you should know that it’s not the Don you’ll be servicing.”

“Oh? Is he doting on Sam’s latest bride? That man always finds his favorite type. It’s infuriating.” It’s gross.

“I guess you could say yes.” He grins. “Please, after you.”

Her attendant opens the doors and she steps through, plastering a fake smile in case the man is in here. He likes to watch these things sometimes. Only instead of Don Corneo or some blushing bride, the room is empty save a beautiful, battered woman in a Wutai kimono of orange and gold. Her legs are covered, but she is clearly wearing dark silk stockings and not much else under the formalwear. Her hair is straight, long, black, shiny. Covetous. The kind of locks only women from the upper plate can normally achieve. Despite the bruise and cut on her face, she watches Madam M enter the room with guarded closeness, with a ferocity in her brown eyes.

No, not a blushing bride. Just what is this? What new misery has Don Corneo cooked up for his subordinates?

“Will the Don be joining us?” she asks, directing her attendant to set the table and case up, which he does with practiced efficiency and speed. It all clicks into place and is ready for her within seconds, and no one speaks while this is done.

Leslie says, “If your boy would like some refreshment, you can get acquainted in private with the Donna.”

Donna? Now that’s curious. So curious that Madam M waves her attendant away, eyes never leaving this girl. This _Donna_. She is maybe half the Madam’s age. Before she has to hide the gray, the wrinkles, the bitterness of a life misspent. 

The door closes behind her, and they are alone. Madam M gestures to the massage table with her long-nailed hand, but the woman doesn’t move.

“If you would be so kind as to strip down and get on the table, we can begin,” Madam M says, mildly frustrated.

“You’re not going to ask what this is? Why he called me the Donna?”

She waves her hand imperiously. “I’m sure Don Corneo has his reasons. Maybe he’s getting into roleplay, who knows.”

This woman shrugs. “Maybe he’s dead.”

That brings Madam M up short. “Dead.”

She prides herself on reading people, and this woman’s cool exterior is veiling something, but she can’t tell exactly. Fear. Anger. Horror. Maybe a little of all of it. 

This _Donna_ says, “I choked the life out of him because of what he did.” Madam M does her the favor of gasping dramatically, while backing away a couple of steps towards the door. Part theater, part tactful retreat. 

“If he’s dead, then why hasn’t Shinra come raining down upon this place? They keep a close watch, I’m told.” Widening of eyes, tightening of jaw. 

The woman shrugs. “You didn’t know. Why should they?”

Madam M smiles back. She saw the crack in the woman’s demeanor that time. She may know about Corneo’s Shinra dealings, but she isn’t aware of how deeply in their pocket he is. Was.

“So then you’re the new power in Wall Market, is that what this is? You’re… asserting your dominance? A show of power?”

“I am merely getting to know my employees.”

“And you have me at a disadvantage, I’m sure. If you are strong enough to take down the Don, surely you could snap my neck as soon as look at me.” She can’t see this woman’s muscle definition under the kimono, but she believes it’s there. There may be uncertainty in her voice, but there’s confidence in her movements.

“You may call me Donna Lockhart. I’ll be honest, Madam M. I don’t really want a massage. I’m… learning as I go. I wasn’t much for organized crime.”

That has the stink of honesty about it, and Madam M smiles viciously. There’s an opportunity here. “So you kill the big fat man for laying his hands on your big fat assets? Seems a little overkill, if _I’m_ being honest.”

Donna Lockhart doesn’t smile back. “For his hand in Sector 7.”

“What did he have to do with that?” 

This Lockhart woman approaches the massage table, and leans back on it to rest a bit. To lazily relax while she pokes through the standing case’s bottles and tinctures. “Corneo did what bottomfeeders always do. The dirty work that clean hands won’t.”

If what she says is true, Madam M isn’t sure death is good enough for him. A man who conspires to destroy an eighth of a city doesn’t deserve to live, but it sounds like his death was too clean. Too quick.

Madam M pops open her fan, and shakes it in front of her, for the air is suddenly stifling. “If what you say is true, Donna Lockhart, what stops Shinra from storming the castle, so to speak, and cleaning up the muck that might tell tales?”

“Shinra is my problem to deal with. What I need from you, and the other members of the Trio, is to continue about the Wall Market’s business, as if nothing has changed. To everyone but us, Corneo still gets his brides. Still controls the Market. Still gets his kickbacks.”

“And what does my silence buy? I could no doubt become the Mistress of Wall Market if you were to be turned in.”

“You could do that, and hope for the best.” Donna Lockhart shifts her legs a little, so that one long, muscled leg is revealed under the folds of the kimono. “Or you could serve a woman who will never demand you service her, while greedy hands take more than you wish. You could help topple an empire and never be suspected.”

Topple an empire. She speaks big, pretty words, doesn’t she? Madam M doesn’t know what it is about this woman, this Donna Lockhart, that is so compelling. Her beauty, for certain. Her appearance and demeanor that makes Madam M want to comfort her, to protect her. Her smile that simply asks for your faith and rewards you for it. And still there’s an opportunity here. One shot.

Madam M steps closer, fanning herself more. “You would never _force_ me to service you, but would you deny me the pleasure of it?” She reaches out to the thigh high stocking, hooks a finger inside the elastic band at the top, and stares into Donna Lockhart’s eyes. The Donna’s considerable chest heaves slightly with an intake of breath, but she doesn’t stop Madam M.

“I think you are a fascinating creature, Donna Lockhart. But you’re no crime lord with your pouty eyes. Not yet. Would you like to play the role, while we’re alone?”

Donna Lockhart breaks the gaze first to look down at the finger in her stocking, and Madam M snaps the fan shut and grabs her by the chin in one smooth motion. Pulls her eyes back up.

“Stand up, my Donna, and tell me what you desire.”

The new Donna of Wall Market nods, and stands to her full height in front of Madam M. “Beg? I want you to beg to service me, Madam M.” She almost squirms as she says it.

Madam M smiles, and drops the closed fan to the case with all the oils. “Of course, Donna Lockhart. Nothing would please me more.”

She reaches for the woman’s kimono, releasing the bow that holds it in place, pressing the fabric back and over her shoulders so that it pools at her feet. Underneath it all, Donna Lockhart has a black, lacy bra and underwear no doubt acquired from the former Don’s brides, and the stockings all the way up her legs. And damn is this woman fit, with muscles in all the right places, definition anyone would die to trace with a finger. 

She stands before Madam M, cheeks flushing red, struggling not to cover her midriff with her arms, and Madam M reaches for those hesitant arms. Places one hand on her shoulder and taps it. Keeps the other and kisses the calloused palm. Fighter’s hands. The new Donna has more worthiness in one scarred knuckle than Corneo had in his whole body. A woman who fights for what she believes in versus a man who gets what he wants through fear and intimidation. Pity she doesn’t know what’s about to happen.

Donna Lockhart presses down on Madam M’s shoulders when she taps the hand there a second time. Madam M lowers slowly to her knees, playing the obedient servant while taking in the body of this woman, this warrior, as she drops. Madam M does not fancy women, but she plays the part, and admits to herself that this is a gift to any allowed to touch it. Once on her knees in front of Donna Lockhart, she takes the hand she’s holding and forces it to grip the back of her hair.

Madam M says, “No hesitation. No shame. Only a powerful woman assured of her own place in this world, taking what she knows is hers.”

Donna Lockhart forces a chuckle. “This is--this is not what I--”

“Of course not. But it’s good practice. And let me tell you, my Donna, it will be such a pleasure for me not to be faced with that man ever again.”

She reaches out for Donna Lockhart’s stocking again, breathing in the perfume and scent of this woman, and finds it pleasing. A mix of perspiration and concealed desire. The stocking rolls down her leg.

Donna Lockhart leans back against the massage table, biting her lip while tossing her head back. Her cheeks are full on flushed with embarrassment and lust, and Madam M chooses that moment to strike.

The concealed dagger in her voluminous robe slips into a hand, and in an instant she’s on her feet, dagger held at Donna Lockhart’s throat, the woman gasping with surprise at how fast Madam M--

And in that briefest of victories, Donna Lockhart’s hand moves. Madam M’s fingers bend and nearly snap backwards as the dagger clatters to the ground. She cries out at the pain. With the other hand still on Madam M’s head, Donna Lockhart yanks her around, sliding her legs out from under her with a hip roll, pressing the woman to the massage table while Donna Lockhart lets her own momentum carry her on top, cradling Madam M like a lover, gripping her neck like the opposite.

Her flush is now anger, her skin warm and slick against Madam M.

Her one shot, and she blew it. But who could have guessed this Lockhart woman was capable of that speed?

Donna Lockhart leans down into Madam M’s face, breath hot on her cheek. “Consider the lesson learned, Madam M. When you leave here today, if Andrea or Sam catch wind of me before I have my interview, I’ll come for you. Look at me.”

Madam M sighs and looks into Donna Lockhart’s eyes. This is over, even if the Donna doesn’t understand it yet. She may be inexperienced and naive, but she’s got the strength and will to cover it.

She finishes, “You know I can find you, and you know I will.”

Madam M forces a smile. “Never a doubt in my mind, Donna Lockhart. Playing a role, all I was doing, honest.” Donna Lockhart lets the woman go and rolls off her in one fluid motion, all liquid muscle and confidence. 

She says, “There’s no place for honesty anymore.”

Madam M gathers her belongings, and hurries from the room while Donna Lockhart slips the kimono back on over her lingerie. Before she leaves Donna Lockhart’s sight, Madam M would swear the woman’s fingers begin to shake with what just happened. Her attendant, waiting outside, shuffles after her trying to take the folding table and the case, but she’s in too big a hurry. Her one shot to seize control has come and gone, stolen by this stranger, this child of a woman so scared of what just happened that she can’t even hide it seconds after it’s over. 

Donna Lockhart is a warrior despite all that. 

Madam M hurries back to her own domain. To think about what it means to serve a woman like Donna Lockhart. Who has vengeance in her heart, but her heart on her sleeve. How does one serve a woman like that and not end up in the firing squad beside her?

An interesting question. One, Madam M admits, she’s willing to find out.

Andrea Rhodea sashays into the office of Don Corneo as if he owns the room. He knows he does not, but anything to get under Corneo’s skin in subtle ways. His demeanor has always bothered the hyper masculine Corneo, but the man lets him alone because the Honeybee Inn is so very profitable, even if half the clientele doesn’t jive with Corneo’s ideas of masculinity.

So long as it rakes in the gil, he’s content to ignore how it comes.

So it is surprising, then, that Andrea Rhodea is not met with the Don, but rather a woman whose face has seen better days, seated in the Don’s oversized chair, looking diminutive and weak. Her attire is formal but ill-fitting and clashes with the royal red of the room. The bosom is too tight for this kimono, her hair is not done up in the traditional style it demands, and all the accessories are missing.

“What bruised petal before me?” Andrea asks, covering his confusion.

“You must be Andrea Rhodea, proprietor of the Honeybee Inn.” She stands and gives him a slight bow, not of deference but still of respect. It’s a little clumsy, though, and he smiles at her while rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, my dear. Where is the Don?”

He thinks he knows. He hardly dares believe it might be true.

She smiles, so slight that it could be the merest hint of a grin, and steps around the desk to approach him. “I’ve heard more about you than the others of the Trio. You can imagine the opinions are not… gracious.”

“Honey, the more I piss off people, the more I normalize it for less radical folk. Let them say what they want.”

“I like that,” the woman says. “Very pragmatic. You know who you are, and how to get and keep what you want. I have a lot of questions for you, Andrea, if you’re willing to share.”

He glances around the office. There are no guards: no Kotch, Scotch, Leslie, or any other nameless goon around. His eyes fall on the interior of the doorway he entered through, and that’s when he notes the shrapnel. The bullet holes. 

The blood soaked through the floorboards.

“So it’s a coup, then, is it?” he asks. “Am I to assume, then, that Corneo is dead?” He adjusts his collar and prepares to sprint for the doors, while maintaining his calm demeanor.

“Only at the top,” she assures him, and now that she’s closer, Andrea can spy the gloves she wears with brass knuckles hiding in the folds of her kimono sleeves. “You may call me Donna Lockhart.”

Her eyes go wide in shock when he laughs uproariously. He nearly doubles over from the strain of trying to breathe through the elation and laughter. “You have done us all a great favor, Donna Lockhart,” he finally says, wiping tears of joy from his eyes. “What I planned for months took you a day, and the shiner is your only payment.”

Her eyes soften when he says all this, but at the last she averts her gaze. Not the confident, cocky Don, but a woman trying her best to take the reins. 

She says, “Sector 7 was the payment, Andrea. I lost my friends, my family, because Corneo helped Shinra do it.”

He had his suspicions and his spies, but never confirmation. He says as much and sighs. “I’m sorry for your loss, Donna. It’s a hard thing, to come up against tyrants and lose.”

“You’re the second person to refer to Corneo as a tyrant. Why serve him?”

“The alternative of the streets, or a bad home life, for my bees and bears is worse than anything he could force upon me. He allowed me to care for them, so long as the payments and the women kept flowing.” He sighs, for he does not like admitting to this.

“I swallowed my pride while he swallowed whiskey. I crammed my anger down while he crammed cake down his throat. Corneo took advantage of everyone he ever met, and I merely seek to protect those who need it most. My Honeybee Inn is going to be what I always wanted it to be, now that he’s gone. Unless you are going to be as he was.”

She shakes her head. “In some ways, Andrea, we must be as you were. You’ll serve the Donna, and the Donna will serve Shinra for promises and get only scraps. But there will be no ‘brides’.”

Andrea lets his guard down a little at that. How the others of the Trio would take this news, or had already, he had no idea. But the relief that flows through him is something he thought he might only feel after Corneo was dealt with, at his hands.

“You’ve done me and mine a great service, Donna Lockhart.” He bows to her, and she nods to him in return. “The women we sent him were never the same when they came back. If they came back. I appreciate that you are suspending this practice.”

She hesitates at that. A Don, or Donna, should never be seen to hesitate, but she’s doing her best. She says, “You will still be sending me girls, and maybe a man or two, but the criteria is going to be different.”

His back stiffens and his hand on his chest flexes at this turn. “Oh?” 

“I’ve taken over a rat’s nest, Andrea. What I need now, is a pack of lions.”

He grins. “Oh. Oh, my dearest Donna Lockhart, I have such wonders of muscle to show you.”

She smiles back at him, and her confidence returns. He offers a hand to her, and she shakes it with firm conviction. Good. Andrea can work with this woman. Everything has changed overnight, and though he had been positioning himself to take over when his own plot against Corneo finally struck, maybe it won’t be necessary at all. He can continue focusing on his bees and bears, while Donna Lockhart builds an army and infiltrates Shinra.

He frowns, looking at her clothing, though. “Tell me, Donna, how much do you hate this outfit?”

She chuckles and grins, flushed. “It’s awful, isn’t it? I’ve been stuck deciding how I want to appear as the Donna, once my presence is known.”

His frown turns to pensive concentration, and then a smile as he decides. “My stylists will come by immediately. They will find what makes Donna Lockhart fearsome, feared, fabulous.”

A new dawn under a new Donna. He can certainly work with this, if she is even half the woman he thinks she is.

Chocobo Sam admits to a little nervousness. He’s been on edge ever since he sent Miss Tifa into Corneo’s den. She was a sweet girl, and pretty as a peach. But with her entire Sector destroyed just hours after she vanished inside, he’s feeling a little guilty. Does she even know? Did she have family? Kids? She’s young for that, but some aren’t more’n kids when they have ‘em. There’s refugees, sure, but what are the odds any of her people got out in time?

Bad, and he only plays the long odds when he’s feeling froggy and has gil to burn. So it is with some trepidation that Sam waves hello to Leslie at the gates, tips his hat, and stops before going inside. With him are two guards he’s never seen before, or rather, he’s never seen them _here_. He swears they’re honeybees, of all things. 

He grins at the pretty women in combat fatigues, and admits that they do have a little muscle, and spark in their eyes. “Corneo expanding his guards, or punishing Andrea?”

Leslie chuckles. “A fist is a fist, and Corneo loves eye candy.”

“That he does. Speaking of, how’s Miss Tifa?” he asks.

Leslie shifts uncomfortably. “I’m sure you’ll see her inside. Corneo’s been distracted by all this platefall business, and he’s calling everyone in for chats.”

“You don’t have to remind me. Kotch showed up lookin’ even more weasely ‘an usual and demanded a meeting.”

“Kotch has no cool, you know that.”

“Yes, sir, he does. It’s that Scotch what’s always with him keeping it from showing, and I saw him scooting the city.”

“Maybe the boss laid into him, I dunno.”

“Corneo upset about something? I figure he’s plotting ten ways to profit off the platefall, and nine are already underway.”

“Maybe. I’ve been busy training the new guards.”

“Hmm.” He shrugs and heads on in, that feeling of anxiousness growing. Miss Tifa may in fact be the lucky bride who doesn’t command much of his attention, if he’s in a furor to profit. He doesn’t have to like his part in Corneo’s dealings even while handing the girls over. Never sat right with him, but the girls make their own choices and it gives him the freedom to live his life, tinker, and drive the chocobos. 

Inside the mansion, Sam glances around, hoping to find Tifa lounging on a sofa or trying on all these fancy Wutai import dresses. But the bottom floor is emptier than usual. There’s a profound silence to the place.

Silence is trouble where Corneo is involved. The man never stops talking unless he’s eating, and he’s a noisy eater.

Sam looks back outside to where Leslie is speaking to the two women guards, while the doors are closing. “Upstairs?” he calls.

“Office!” Leslie confirms as the doors seal shut, and tomblike silence falls over the room.

Sam swallows his anxiety and goes up the steps, each click of his boots on the steps echoing in the hall. Even the Don’s palace seems to be feeling the weight of the plate collapsing. Surely that’s why it’s so strange in here.

He’s half convinced himself of this when he reaches the office doors upstairs, and knocks gently. To his great relief, Miss Tifa’s voice comes out the other side, cheerful and demure, just like he remembers.

“The boss will see you now.”

He breathes a big, heavy sigh. Everything’s okay, of course it is. Just jitters from the terrorist attack, is all.

He pushes open the big double doors letting into Corneo’s office, glancing around for that bright smile he hopes to see, but there’s no one in the opulent room. No soldiers, no Tifa, no Don at his desk with a glass of whiskey and an eye on the books.

The chair is backwards, though, facing away from the desk. Now that he’s paying attention, Sam freezes as the doors close shut behind him. On the desk, unnoticed while looking for Tifa, is a crumpled head, seeming bashed in by a cinder block or something. 

He gasps as he recognizes the blonde tuft of hair sticking out of the top, and then laughs when he realizes it’s not real. It’s the cartoony plastic head from that awful jukebox the Trio sent him as a gift. 

Corneo loved that thing so much; what could cause him to destroy it?

“Welcome to my mansion,” Miss Tifa’s voice says from behind the chair. Only it’s not the same bright, hopeful, and naive voice from before. There’s an edge to it now. Acid in the vowels.

“Miss Tifa?” he calls. He’s confused. None of this makes sense. He called her feisty, but this is something else.

A smart click sounds from behind the chair as a smartly-dressed Tifa stands up, in a white button-up shirt with a purple waistcoat over it. Tifa’s hair has been shaved on one side, with the rest draped over the other side and hanging loose over her shoulder. In the long side of her hair sticks the yellow flower she wore the day she rode in his carriage, bright and cheerful.

“From now on, Chocobo Sam, you will call me Donna Lockhart.” A flash of motion and a leg kicks out at the desk. The crumpled plastic head of Don Corneo clatters to the ground in front of Sam, and he flinches away from it, despite that it isn’t real.

“What the hell is this?” he asks, dumbfounded. This isn’t Miss Tifa, no way. This isn’t the shy woman in the fancy black kimono. And yet, somehow, it is. Her head turns slightly, so that he can see the anger in her eyes, the healing bruise. 

She says, “Take a seat, Sam. We should discuss your employment.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the imagery of Madam M and Tifa's encounter feels somewhat familiar, you probably saw a certain #AerTi image on Twitter that completely influenced that scene. Jen Bartel's FFVII Remake sketches are still giving me life.
> 
> Next chapter: The fallout from platefall for Avalanche and the refugees from Sector 7. Then Aerith and the Avalanche crew look for Tifa in the Wall Market.


	6. Picking Up The Pieces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aerith and Barret regroup with Avalanche and Marlene, then head out to Wall Market, intent on finding Tifa.

_ Earlier _

The trek to Sector 5 was cumbersome, but Aerith and Barret made it in the early hours of the new day, as the sun lamps were scheduled to come on. However, they remained dark. Campfires, flashlights, and generator-powered flood lamps dotted the landscape. Helicopters flew in the distance surveying the damage. When the daylight flooded in from the gaping hole of Sector 7, the rest of the Slums remained dark.

Aerith and Barret found Marlene. They found Wedge, and Biggs, and Jessie, too. They found precious little else. The Leaf House in Sector 5 had become a refugee center. Biggs was injured trying to work his way up to help, and Jessie had a few scrapes and cuts she claimed were gained from the desperate parachute jump they made from the Pillar in the moments before it tumbled. Aerith can’t believe they’ve made it, but maybe Barret is right: Jessie’s got a lot of lives.

Barret’s reunion with Marlene was exhausting for both of them. Aerith offered to put them up in her house deeper into Sector 5, where real sun intruded and her garden still flourished. Where Barret talked a big game on the way here, running through contingencies for when he found Avalanche again, it all went away once he scooped his daughter back up into his arms. They fell asleep upstairs, and Aerith sits at the kitchen table now, hands holding a warm cup of dandelion tea while her mother stands behind her, fusses over her. The quaint little kitchen is comforting in its cramped space.

Elmyra says, “This is all so much, Aerith,” as she combs her fingers through Aerith’s mussed hair, working out the soot and tangles. Aerith’s favorite dress is all but ruined.

“You’re lucky you couldn’t hear the screams, Mom. It was so awful.”

Elmyra hugs Aerith, sniffing back tears. “I can only imagine, with all those poor innocent people having no idea what was happening.”

Aerith shakes her head. “That was bad, but I meant the planet.” Her heart aches. “I think I need to tell the big guy and his team what I am.”

Elmyra sighs and reaches a hand out to Aerith, takes a seat next to her and squeezes her hand for comfort. “You’ve just run away from that danger, dear. Are you sure you want to entrust these strangers?”

Aerith nods. Their tactics may be questionable, but their motives are pure. “These strangers want what’s best for the planet. They’ve been hurt by the damage Shinra’s done to it. Barret also may have overheard the Turks bring up the Ancients in reference to me.”

Elmyra’s shoulders slump and she squeezes Aerith’s hand again. “It’s always Turks with you, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes it’s those wraiths. And every once in a while a thug with a switchblade and a death wish.”

Elmyra snorts laughter. “You’ve never been shy of a fight, that’s for sure. What do you plan to do? You can’t stay here for long; Tseng will surely come looking for you again.”

Aerith shakes her head, frowning. “Barret was talking about finding their friend over in Wall Market. I saw her in passing on my way into Sector 7, and I’m worried about her.”

Elmyra’s smile widens. “Saw her in passing and you’re worried? Must have been something special.”

Aerith’s face grows hot, and then she feels bad for being called out. “I can’t help what I feel, Mom. It’s not just the pretty ones, but the ones with kind souls. I can feel them a mile away, and Tifa is something special, all right.”

“Tifa, huh?”

“I don’t know. We’ll figure it out. I did kinda join their group?”

Elmyra sighs her longsuffering sigh. “My daughter, the ecological activist.”

“They’re calling us terrorists, but the destruction they caused in coverup is worse than anything Avalanche could hope to do. And that isn’t even starting in on what they’re doing with their reactors.”

“Just be careful, whatever you do. Shinra isn’t exactly hiding their evil mustaches at this point.”

“You should have heard the Shinra lady on the news talk about them. She practically cackled. All ‘KYA HA HA’ like a crow or something.” Now THAT woman had been severe and drop dead gorgeous, but so cruel as to be a non-starter.

Aerith sips her tea and adds a little bit of honey. “Apparently Tifa knew the man who fell through my church. They all did, but Tifa was childhood friends with him.” Aerith thinks about him. Cloud Strife. A strong name. What would it do to Tifa when she finds out he is gone?

“That’s a hard thing, but everyone lost people after today. I guess I’m lucky, in that.”

“Yeah, you can’t get rid of me that easily, Mom.”

Elmyra smiles as she stands again. She smooths Aerith’s hair from her face and kisses her forehead. Instantly Aerith feels calmer. Mothers are magic like that. Elmyra says, “You should get some rest if you’re going to join a rebellion and save the princess in the castle.”

The sun lamps come back on sometime during mid-day of the second day post-platefall. They’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern because the avenues are too clogged to travel, and travel between Sectors was limited for the first day due to heightened tensions and worry that more attacks would happen. Even Aerith’s secret shortcuts are either broken or crowded.

But with the sun lamps and the lifting of travel restrictions, Barret hugs his daughter and leaves her in the care of Elmyra, then joins Aerith on the path back to the Leaf House. Marlene waves until they pass out of sight over the bridge, and Barret sighs once they’re gone.

Aerith has on a green blouse to match her eyes, with a light, brown skirt that doesn’t hang too low, and black leggings underneath. Something feminine as she prefers, but still more utilitarian than her favorite, ruined, dress. Jessie took Aerith’s gardening trousers, anyway, complaining that her hips weren’t wide enough for Aerith’s clothing. 

Aerith says, “Marlene’s going to be okay here, big guy.”

Barret shakes his head. “I know it. Your mom’s a good sort and Marlene’s going to have so much fun chasin’ butterflies and shit. I just don’t know when we’ll be back this way.”

“We will, though. Never fear, fearless leader.”

He clears his throat and shrugs. “I’m the one s’posed to be speechifying the troops. We will be back, and with stories of glory and toppling governments.”

“That’s right! Damn the man.”

Barret chuckles and Aerith smiles. They reach the Leaf House and Sector 5, which is abuzz with activity. People looking for loved ones, shelter, work, food. Some sense of purpose in this mad world. Wedge is without his bandana or his regular neighborhood watch gear, wearing instead some old faded clothing, keeping an eye on the Leaf House and the old folks’ home next door, both being used to house anyone who isn’t hurt too bad. 

Barret slaps him on the shoulder as they arrive, and grimaces. “Anything to report?”

Wedge shakes his head, rubbing his shoulder, then hands Barret a big cloth, practically a sheet. “We gotta ditch anything that gives us away. The red bandanas and your gun-arm especially.”

“I’m not throwing this damn thing away.” Barret clutches the sheet and his gun-arm in his one free hand, protective of his weapon.

“Ditch or hide, that’s what the sheet is for,” Wedge says, his gravelly voice tired. “Biggs is still recovering, and Jessie’s out sourcing supplies.”

Barret nods, wrapping the sheet around his weapon like a big sling. It doesn’t do a perfect job of hiding it, but it’ll do for now. He says, “Good to keep her occupied. I got my family out; you and Biggs didn’t have much in the way of people. Our girl lost a lot last night.”

Wedge says to Aerith, “Her parents were on the upper plate of Sector 7, and she had half a dozen roommates down here who were all like sisters to her.”

Aerith frowns. So much loss. “Should we give her time to grieve?”

Barret says, “She’s ready to move forward. We all are, no matter what.” Aerith nods and waves to one of the Leaf House kids, and hands over some medicinal herbs she brought from her garden. Every little bit helps right now. The girl runs back inside the Leaf House excitedly with her small parcel, and Aerith smiles. 

Barret continues, “Any of the others show up yet?”

Wedge hesitates, then says, “Not so far, boss. I’m sure someone will show up, though.”

“Yeah, no doubt,” Barret says. Aerith can feel the tension of these pleasant lies in the air. They know better. “Meantime I think we need to put an ear to the ground and go collect Tifa. It’s already been two days since she left and she’s gotta be losing her shit. She’s maybe worse than Jessie on Sector 7; pillar of the community and all. She’ll want to know some of us made it out.”

Wedge nods. “I hear the road to Wall Market’s crowded, but not impassable anymore. If Shinra soldiers are looking for us, we definitely need to stay low profile, though.”

“Tell you what,” Barret says, rubbing the whiskers on his chin. “Run some recon out there, see if you can’t figure out what’s going on. When Jessie shows back up, and if Biggs is up for it, we’ll be along. Anyone know a place to meet up in Sector 6? I uh, never been.”

Wedge smiles sheepishly and avoids Aerith’s knowing gaze. “There’s a restaurant just off the main drag, counter-style and serves diner food,” he says. “I’ll go there once I’m done asking around and wait for you.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Barret says, offering his hand to Wedge. They clasp at the forearm and Wedge jogs off. Barret looks at Aerith and shrugs. “I’m sure you got people to check on here, too. Come on.” They head inside the Leaf House, which is very packed, and Aerith breaks off from Barret to check on the refugees. He disappears upstairs, where she knows Biggs is resting.

The kids and the displaced from Sector 7 are subdued, but it seems like most of the people who made it out this far were warned early enough to evacuate. Whole families together, some keepsakes and cherished memories gathered up before they fled. As much as Aerith loves her place, she knows it is just that: a place. Hopefully they know it, too. These families are in shock, but Aerith can feel that they’re going to be okay. 

Within half an hour, Jessie comes strolling back in, bags under her eyes but smiling. She’s managed to clean up a little and has braided her hair in a tight coil. Aerith spares a moment to think that Jessie fills out the pants better than she claimed, and Jessie drops a satchel to a table before dropping herself into a chair next to it, sighing deeply.

“Can’t believe the prices people are charging,” Jessie complains, dumping out some basic supplies and organizing it all. “Supply and demand shouldn’t really be a thing during a tragic event.”

Aerith brings Jessie a glass of water, and sits down at the table with her while she slurps it down. Together they sort the food staples, medical supplies, and ammunition for their guns. Jessie pulls a small pouch from her side and drops an orb of blue materia into Aerith’s hands. 

“Figure you might be able to make use of this, the way you fought with it up on th-the tower.” Her voice hitches slightly as she brings up the tower, but she smiles uncertainly and goes back to sorting.

Aerith holds the new materia in her hands and feels something curious. The blue materia feels strange compared to the green varieties she has been using: it almost draws itself towards the green orbs of materia in her pouch, like it wants to be a part of it. Most curious.

Aerith brings her staff over and slots the materia into one of the two receptacles. She chooses the windy materia from her pouch and slots it into the second spot. They almost hum together. Aerith can use the green materia outside of a weapon, which isn’t something she thinks most people can do, but she wonders suddenly if there are new ways to employ it. To combine it? She knows a little about materia, but this is new to her.

She says, “I have a lot of materia at this point, we could have done without if there were other supplies that were more necessary.”

“Nonsense. We got more clips, you get more magic pew pew. Now where’s the boss? How soon are we moving out?” In answer, Barret’s heavy boots come trouncing down the steps and Jessie hops up excitedly. 

Barret says, “We’re going after Tifa; Jessie, you up for a trip to Wall Market?”

“Right as riches, boss.” She salutes, then thinks better of it halfway through and it ends awkwardly. “Guess we’re gonna have to avoid doing stuff like that, huh?”

“For the moment.”

“I see Wedge found you with the expert disguise,” Jessie says, nodding at Barret’s covered gun-arm.

“It’ll do in a pinch. Carbuncle, you ready to set out?”

It takes a moment for Aerith to realize he’s talking to her. “I don’t get to skip the crappy nickname phase of being the green recruit?”

Barret grins. “No one gets to skip that phase. We got to calling Cloud ‘Stamp’, you know, after that cute dog Shinra uses.”

Aerith good-naturedly huffs and stands up. “I guess I’m ready, then.”

Jessie gathers the various supplies back up, handing some ammunition to Barret as she stuffs it all back into the pack, better organized now. “I’m gonna go see Biggs real quick, I’ll meet you outside?”

“Make it snappy.”

“Aye aye, Boss.” Jessie disappears up the steps while Aerith and Barret step outside. More of the Leaf House orphans surround Aerith, chattering excitedly, and then when Barret shoos them away with a mean face and a meaner growl, Aerith scowls at him.

“What?”

“You have a daughter and you’re going to stand there and pretend like that wasn’t super mean?”

“We’re on task, Carbuncle. No time for playing big sister anymore.”

“Says you.”

“Says the mission.” He harrumphs and they fall into unpleasant silence while waiting for Jessie. She comes down after another minute or two, still looking tired but energized after speaking with her friend. Aerith’s pretty sure they’re just friends, the way Jessie talked about Cloud.

“All set, Barret,” Jessie says, giving a wink and a nod to Aerith as she passes by. “We meeting Wedge out there?”

“Yup. I guess he knows the Sector.”

Jessie smiles. “Of course he does. Good food, pretty girls, cheap drinks. What’s not to like?”

Jessie comes on a bit strong, but Aerith likes the woman all the same. They could be friendly rivals, if their circumstances were less serious.

The trip to Sector 6 and the Wall Market takes longer than it should. There’s new debris in the paths, people everywhere milling about. There’s the occasional Shinra patrol that they have to sidestep, and every time they wait for them to pass by, Barret’s fist clenches and his teeth grind with frustration that he can’t just knock their heads in right then and there. But he contains himself, and they move on.

They even see some of the other community leaders from Sector 7, whom Jessie informs Aerith are named Marle and Wymer, organizing survivors and coordinating supplies donated by the other undercity sectors. Barret simply waves at them from afar as they move through the little refugee camp, and Marle nods and smiles at them as they pass on by. 

Barret says, “We can swing back through after we find Tifa, see if anyone else made it out.”

Jessie frowns as they leave the camp behind. “I thought maybe I’d see one of my roommates.”

“We’ll look for ‘em, Jess. Bigger fish to fry right now.”

“I know. Tifa’s the priority.”

Aerith places a consoling hand on Jessie’s shoulder, and Jessie smiles sadly at her, squeezes the hand. “Barret gave you a good nickname.” Aerith blushes slightly, but is pleased.

He grunts. “Yeah, yeah, I always know just what to say. Now let’s keep it movin’.”

They make it to Sector 6 as the sun lamps dim for another night, and the smoggy sky showing through the hole in the plate goes to sunset. A trip that should take an hour took half the day, and now they’re staring at another night wondering where their friend is, if she’s okay.

Not her friend, Aerith reminds herself. You don’t even know her.

Though the sun lamps only came on today, and power has been spotty in general the last couple days, the Wall Market is a disgusting display of neon opulence. Though the streets are busy with regular denizens and refugees, the general air of the place is that of disturbed nonchalance. Business goes on.

And, telling enough, there is no Shinra presence in Wall Market at all.

“We’re lookin’ for a diner,” Barret says after they get the lay of the land.

Jessie nods. “Right. I know a couple in the area.”

“Oh yeah? You moonlight at the Honeybee Inn?” Aerith teases, and Jessie grins. 

“The honeybees aren’t as fun as the honeybears, believe me.”

“Honey...bears?” Aerith asks. Her mind instantly fills with lewd images of burly, hairy men. Not her type, but she can appreciate all kinds. “I have questions,” she says, and Jessie laughs. It’s good to see her tired eyes share a genuine smile.

“Where’s this diner?” Barret presses onward, ignoring their lusty conversation.

Jessie and Aerith follow along, and though this place has a reputation for being skeezy and manipulative, it kind of seems like a place for people who fell through the cracks of polite society. Interesting hairdos, gritty, grungy clothes, tattoos and piercings. Men dressed as women, women dressed as men. Openly drinking in the streets like every night’s a party, even so soon after a tragedy. No one hating or fighting, at least in the main areas. Its reputation is not earned so much as misunderstood, Aerith thinks.

And yet she knows Don Corneo’s reputation might be wholly separate from the rest of Wall Market. And that’s where Tifa is, in his hands.

It takes a couple restaurants before they find the one Wedge is posted up in, but he grabs the kabobs from his plate and goes outside when they spot him. Barret leads them over to the entrance of an alley, where they can have a bit more private of a chat. 

Wedge says, “I’d ask if you want the good news or bad news first, but there’s really only bad news.” He latches on to a skewer of meat and tears it off the kabob stick, then offers the other skewers of meat and vegetable to the group. Aerith and Jessie each take one gratefully, and it’s a bit gamey, but they haven’t eaten in hours so it’s delicious.

“Out with it,” Barret says.

“I can’t find anything out about Corneo, and the guy who picked Tifa up to bring her here, Chocobo Sam, is currently MIA. He was around after the plate fell, but no one’s seen him since this afternoon.”

Barret slams his gun-arm against the metal siding of the building they’re standing next to, which scares a couple of people smoking in a storefront nearby. “Who gives a damn about the asshole who brought her here?”

Wedge winces. “Sam’s one of the Trio. They pick the girls Don Corneo sees, and he transports them. I figured we could start with the last person we know has seen her?” Barret grunts grudging agreement. 

“The Trio,” Jessie says. “That’s Andrea and Madam M, too.”

“Any reason we shouldn’t just go over and shoot up Corneo’s place, get answers?”

“We’re trying not to draw attention to ourselves,” Aerith reminds him, rapping a knuckle against his metal gun-arm.

“It’s late, anyway,” Jessie says. “We didn’t know it was going to take half the day just to get here.”

Barret scratches the stubble on his chin in thought. “This place looks like it doesn’t sleep, why should we?”

“Because we need to be at our best, and our best was two days and twelve hours ago,” Jessie says. She rubs her tired eyes. “C’mon, Boss. We need to sleep if we’re gonna mount any rescues.”

Wedge interjects, “There’s a hostel down the street that doesn’t ask too many questions.” He hesitates and then blushes. “I used it as a hiding spot in the early days of Avalanche. Might be full with all the refugees around, but might not.”

Aerith nods at him and looks to Barret. He’s the leader; he makes the call. 

Barret says, “Maybe we could get a few hours. But as soon as the lamps are on, or supposed to be on, we’re hauling out and finding our girl.”

“Of course,” Jessie says. “We’re all anxious to find her, too.”

WIth that settled, Wedge leads them to a place they can rest. It takes some dickering with the hostel owner and reshuffling of some people, a little gil and some of their precious foodstuffs, but they negotiate two cramped rooms and retire for the evening. Barret and Wedge take the larger of the rooms; in almost no time, Aerith hears them both snoring. In Aerith and Jessie’s room, the light flickers and the bed looks like it has recently been slept in, but they’re not likely to find anything nicer, or realistically anything at all.

Jessie yawns and offloads her various satchels into a pile on the floor next to the small bed. “I know I said we need to sleep, but if I’m being honest, Carbuncle, I don’t know if I can.”

“Have you slept at all since… well, since it happened?”

Jessie drops to the bed, which creaks, and undoes the laces on her boots. “The bags under my eyes are probably answer enough, but not really. I… I haven’t stopped long enough to sleep.”

“Wedge mentioned that you had roommates, and your parents were on the upper plate.”

“I don’t wanna talk about any of that.”

Aerith delicately sits down on the edge of the bed next to Jessie. The woman is so confident, so sure of herself, and so very broken inside right now. “We don’t have to talk about it, but you need to slow down and rest. And--and if you’re afraid that if you stop, you’ll start to think, I can keep you distracted.”

“You gonna sing me a lullaby?” Jessie asks with a snarky grin.

“Something like that. Have you ever heard the stories of the Ancients?”

Jessie eyes her askance. “Bedtime stories it is.” She leans back and curls up on the bed. “Go on, then. I’m listening.”

Aerith nods and takes a deep breath. “Long ago, before humans knew the powers of the Lifestream, or Mako, or these silly orbs of materia, there was a race of people called the Cetra.”

“That silly materia saved your life,” Jessie says, and Aerith sticks her tongue out at the woman.

“So did a girl with a grenade and a man with a gun for an arm. Now hush. The Cetra were a migratory people, born of the Planet, connected to the Lifestream, and capable of spinning that energy into new life. They traveled the world, constantly in search of a promised land which would signal their journey’s end, and their return to the Planet.”

“That’s not how I heard it growing up,” Jessie says, yawning. “A lot of people thought Midgar was the Promised Land, because the Mako basically just flowed out of the ground.”

“A lot of people don’t know the first thing about planetology, the Lifestream, or humanity’s connection to it.” Aerith smooths her skirt and looks back at Jessie. She’s not asleep, but she’s resting, relaxed, distracted. “Even before the Cetra left the land to rejoin the Planet, some chose to remain behind. Those who stayed gradually lost their connection to the Planet, to the life-giving energy of the Lifestream, and began building monuments to a different kind of progress. Homes. Farms. Buildings to shelter within.”

Jessie yawns, eyes closed, and says, “‘Cause sleeping outside is soooo great.”

“It has its perks. The night sky shows us that we’re not alone. That other planets with other peoples may be out there. That somewhere, in the vast universe, those other people may be thinking about us.”

“Sounds--nice,” Jessie mumbles. Her breathing changes, grows slower, heavier. She drifts off, and Aerith falls to silence, sitting on the edge of the bed. 

They have a lot of work to do, and sometimes that work is caring for those you need to rely on. The strained lines on Jessie’s forehead, around her eyes, begin to slacken as peaceful slumber takes her. 

Aerith whispers, “We Cetra have a gift, connecting you with the Planet your people forgot, reminding you what it means to coexist with the Lifestream. I’m sorry about your parents, and your other losses, Jessie. They’ve returned to the Planet, and maybe, just maybe, they’re here with you now.”

Jessie doesn’t respond, but a phantom breeze ruffles the unbraided part of her hair in front, and a ghost of a smile settles on her lips.

Aerith sighs with the effort of communing with the Planet. She doesn’t always know how to do it, or when it will even respond to her, and in these moments she misses her mother terribly. Her birth mother, a pureblooded Cetra who might have taught her everything she needed to know, if she’d had the chance.

Aerith prays in communion once more before she lays on the floor, wraps a threadbare blanket around her, and rests. Big day tomorrow. She’s going to meet Tifa.

She’s got a good feeling about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally going to be the entirety of the Wall Market adventure, but it got too big and unwieldy. Instead, the next two chapters will post a couple days apart from this one and each other over the next week. Sorry for the delay in getting this story out there!


	7. The Trio's Deal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In their pursuit of a way in to meet Don Corneo and find Tifa, Aerith and the Avalanche crew meet with one of the Trio, strike a deal, and prepare for combat.

In the morning, Aerith wakes to find that Jessie is already up and out of the room. The hustle and bustle of a mid-day Wall Market greets her, and she can’t believe she slept through the morning.

She cleans up and finds her way outside, looking for Barret, Wedge, or Jessie. Wedge comes back first and greets her with a sandwich and a bottle of juice. “Figured you’d be hungry,” he says, leaning against the wall Aerith is already leaning on. This side street in Wall Market is relatively quiet, but the low hum of activity in the main drag sets Aerith’s imagination running.

Aerith smiles and thanks him as she tears into the basic sandwich. Supplies are low and she feels lucky to have gotten this much. “Where are the others?”

“Those two decided to go scope out Corneo’s mansion, figure out what’s what. I’m sure they’ll be back soon. I also heard rumors that Chocobo Sam popped back up this morning, but I haven’t been able to track him down yet.”

“So we might have something, and we might have nothing,” Aerith confirms. She sighs as she drinks the juice, some mixed berry blend that tastes too artificial, but she’s not complaining. “So you know Wall Market pretty well, huh?”

He gulps visibly and blushes. “I mostly come for the food and the music.”

“I think I’d spend my time taking in the sights,” Aerith hints, and he glances at her, unsure. “A pretty person is a pretty person, Wedge, and there’s no shame in admiring the goods if they’re on display for it.”

“Really? You’re not gonna, like, get me to admit I go to the Honeybee Inn and then make fun of me for it?”

“Make fun? Before this adventure’s over, I expect you to introduce me to the prettiest ones.”

“I don’t really know that much about the men…”

“So you can point out the bees instead of the bears. I’m not picky. At least, not in that way.”

Wedge grins now. “You’re something else, Carbuncle.”

She groans good-naturedly at the nickname. “Life’s too short not to live it out loud,” she says, nudging him playfully with a shoulder.

Getting the okay from Aerith, Wedge loosens up and his voice cracks a little more as he animatedly talks. “Okay, so there’s this one, she wears glasses and keeps her hair in a kind of poof on top of her head. She’s only a performer on stage, but she’s real nice at the bar after.”

“Aw, Wedge has a crush?” Aerith teases, and his face goes red again. “You and Biggs have boys’ nights out this way?”

“Nah, Biggs is too stressed all the time for a relaxing night out. He’ll drink with the crew, but otherwise he’s making plans, and contingencies for the plans, and backups for the contingencies for the plans. It’s a whole cycle with that guy.”

“Must be driving him crazy to be stuck in recovery.”

“He’s all right. A little downtime won’t kill him, and he’ll be back up and running at full speed before you know it.”

Barret and Jessie appear in the narrow side street’s entrance. Barret stalks forward with frustration in his bearing, while Jessie casually strolls, looking much refreshed after the last couple days of too little sleep and too much worry.

Barret scoffs once they gather together. “This place is bullshit.”

Jessie grins. “He’s just mad they wouldn’t let us in to see Don Corneo.”

“They told me I ain’t pretty enough.” He bangs his still-covered gun-arm against the building. “My gun’s plenty gorgeous.”

Jessie laughs. “That isn’t the only thing they said and you know it, Boss.”

“They said we gotta get approval to meet the boss, and he only lets in people who meet his specifications. And that comes from the Trio.”

“And?” Jessie prods him.

He hesitates. “I might make the cut if I clean up a bit.”

“Did you ask about Tifa?” Wedge asks.

Barret shakes his head. “They were tight-lipped. I brought up her name and the whiny little brat shut up quick. I think something bad’s happened to her, but Jessie talked me down from just shooting up the place.”

“Because if Don Corneo’s as dangerous as he sounds, we’re not about to just waltz in to his stronghold and make demands,” Jessie reminds him, and he shrugs. 

“Yeah, yeah. If I’m not allowed to go knockin’ skulls, I might need to go blow off some steam at that arena we saw on the way over. Looked like they were setting up for something tonight. Wedge, you have any luck on your end?”

Wedge shakes his head now. “Andrea over at the Honeybee Inn is hard to get a meeting with. Chocobo Sam is apparently back this morning, but I haven’t been able to find him. And the third member of the Trio, this Madam M, shut the door in my face when I asked about getting a meet with Don Corneo.”

“She say anything else?” Barret asks.

“Not to come back until I have someone worth her time.”

“Auditioning like Tifa did? Gross.” Jessie’s face turns up in a sour expression. “But if it gets a foot in the door, I’ll show a little ankle.”

“Me too,” Aerith says. “Maybe between us, she’ll find someone ‘worth her time’ and we’ll have a place to start.”

“I’m not taking off my clothes for some mobster underling,” Barret says, but Aerith thinks he will, if it gets them closer to Tifa, to restoring the team, to getting revenge on Shinra.

So they agree and Wedge leads them to the northern part of Wall Market, where Madam M’s massage parlor prominently rests on the main drag. It’s too early in the day for much activity in the area, especially for post-disaster nearby, but it’s doing a steady business all the same. 

“What’s the plan?” Jessie asks as they near the parlor.

Wedge says, “She’ll recognize me, and since I don’t meet the Don’s picky requirements, what if I act as a broker for the rest of you?”

“They call that a pimp,” Barret says.

Wedge balks. “I--”

“He’s messing with you, buddy,” Jessie says. “We know what we’re about. Go on, lead with the pretty one first.”

Aerith instantly knows what Jessie means by that, and Wedge glances between the two women nervously. Jessie smirks and leans in. “Well? Go on.”

“Uhhh…” He sweats and Aerith sticks her tongue out at both of them.

She says, “Don’t torture the poor guy. I caught a glimpse of Tifa in that chocobo cart the other day. Between us, Jessie’s the closer in body type.”

“Excuse me,” Jessie says, indignant. “Nobody’s got that body but Tifa.”

“I mean you’re a bit more fit. You’ve got muscles as well as a knockout look.”

Jessie’s face flushes at the compliment, and she nods. “Sure. Let me get dolled up and we’ll do this.”

Jessie disappears into another shop nearby, and Barret crosses his one real arm across his chest, holding his gun-arm hidden in the sling. “Never seen that girl in makeup before.”

“She’ll probably knock your socks off,” Aerith says, grinning. “She used to be an actress, right? Didn’t you ever see her perform?”

“Not on any big stage anywhere,” Wedge says. “Just the stuff she did in the slums to kill time between missions.”

Aerith smiles as Jessie’s head pops back out of the shop. Her hair has been let down and she’s applied some basic foundation and color to soften the hard lines of her face. She does in fact look pretty even slightly dolled up. Aerith whispers, “Well, put on a show for her now. She’ll appreciate it even if she doesn’t say so.”

Aerith nods at the woman as she steps out of the shop, glances back inside the door as it closes, shrugs, and comes back to the group. She’s got on a skirt instead of the trousers she had on a few minutes prior. “Well, how do I look? Good enough to get the attention of a mobster?”

“Good enough to work at the Honeybee Inn,” Wedge says; Barret just grunts approvingly. Jessie laughs and socks Wedge in the arm. 

She says, “The guy in that shop was kind of a creep. He let me use his restroom, but I think he was hoping to take a peek.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me around here,” Barret says. “Come on, let’s do this. Tifa’s waitin’.”

The group nods, and Wedge re-approaches the door to Madam M’s massage parlor. It swings open as he nears it, and a very lovely woman a decade or more Aerith’s senior, somewhere in her late thirties no doubt, smiles at the lot of them. She’s the kind of woman who knows she’s gorgeous and uses it to her advantage. She’s also the kind of woman who knows she’s past her prime for the line of work she’s in, and has become the Matron. The Madam.

Her voice is seductive, dusky, inviting. “Well, well, my boy, you don’t waste any time. Please, come in, all of you, let me take a look.”

Wedge ushers the ladies through, and Barret follows with a wary eye. Madam M gives him an appreciative eye as well, and he grunts as the door closes them into inviting warmth and soft light. 

Madam M continues, “Go on, introduce them.” She holds a folding fan up to her face and lightly wafts it, waiting.

Wedge clears his throat and holds a hand out to Jessie. “This is Miss Jessica Strawberry.”

Jessie cuts a glare at him for the too similar fake name before smiling graciously and inclining her head towards the woman. “Pleasure to meet you, Madam M.”

“Mm,” the Madam says, “You look a little uncomfortable, dear. Tell me, are you more inclined to trousers than skirts?”

“Yes, pants are easier to work in.”

“And you have some muscle definition… You’re not the traditional offering I’d send to the Don, by any stretch, but Sam was always right when he chose the spunky ones. Are you spirited, Jessica?”

“I’d prefer Jessie, if that helps.”

Madam M nods. “Yes, that fits your whole… look. Hm. Maybe. Proceed with the large angry man next, please.”

Barret’s mouth opens in anger, but Wedge talks over him. “This is Mr. Horus Holtz.”

These fake names are something else, far too close for Jessie, and far too different for Barret. Aerith wonders what Wedge will say when it’s her turn.

“Good to meet you,” Barret says, inclining his head like Jessie did, only he fumbles it a bit and runs his hand over his head. “I’m not good with the niceties.”

Madam M smiles at him. “With your muscles the size of my torso, I don’t imagine you have to be, Mr. Holtz. You’re not precisely what I think of when I think of the… boss’s appetites, but he’s mercurial. You look like a bodyguard more than a body man, though.”

“I’m nobody’s body anything,” Barret says, grunting when Wedge elbows his side to play nice. Aerith nearly giggles. 

“No, you definitely are not. I might have to send you to someone else, though.” She glances back at Wedge, and Aerith suddenly sees an interest in her eyes that wasn’t there before. Who is that glance for? She says, “And now the waif, if you please.”

“Waif?” Aerith says, scoffing.

“It’s a compliment, believe me, dear.” Aerith settles her anger, only slightly mollified.

Wedge says, “This is Miss Aer-- Aeris.” Aerith rolls her eyes. Great cover names.

Madam M walks around Aerith, examining her. “You don’t really have the body for this line of work, you know?” Aerith opens her mouth to protest, but Madam M steps forward and presses the now-folded fan into her back, while grabbing above her chest with her other hand. “Perhaps it’s a matter of _posture_.” She adjusts Aerith’s stance, digs a sandaled foot under Aerith’s oversized work boots to force her up on the frontal arches of her feet, as if she is wearing heels.

“Perhaps I was wrong,” Madam M says, while Aerith balances in this unnatural posture. Jessie whistles appreciatively, and Aerith checks herself in the mirror on the wall. She blushes at herself in this provocative pose, emphasizing her feminine assets, and then spoils it by losing her balance and dropping back to her usual stance.

“Well, you certainly could have something, with some practice,” Madam M says dismissively. “Oh, but what to do.”

She sighs to herself and looks between the three offerings, then walks behind her little counter. Another guest leaves from behind a curtain, looking gobsmacked and happy, and someone else enters from outside, entering the curtain the previous guest exited, as if on a schedule. Madam M examines them all again and huffs in annoyance.

“I suppose I could send the spunky one. Jessie, wasn’t it?”

Jessie grins broadly and Aerith feels… not disappointment, really. But something like it. “Yes, ma’am,” Jessie says.

“Very good. But I can’t let you go up there looking… like this. Do you have the funds to make this young lady into something truly ravishing?”

Oh. Well, shit. The panic in everyone’s eyes tells the tale well enough. “I won’t send in a drowned slum rat and call it a poodle. No offense, dear, your slum chic is fun, but it won’t impress anyone powerful. Yes, I think I have just the way to accentuate your gifts.”

“How much will it cost?” Wedge asks after Barret nudges him.

“Oh, probably more than you’ve seen your entire life,” Madam M says dismissively. “But I have a solution for that, as well. There’s a tournament at the fighting arena in a couple hours. You, big man, Mr. Holtz?”

“Uh huh.”

“You look like you’d fit right in on the sands of the pit. I’ll withdraw my usual contenders for the night and enter you instead. You win, I sponsor the girl and set her up with all the accoutrement she will need to win the Don’s… heart.”

Ugh. Aerith nearly gags out loud for effect, but she reins it in. “I’ll go with him,” she says instead. 

“You?” Madam M asks, incredulous. “You’re barely fit for a distraction.”

Aerith holds up her staff, concentrates on the materia within, and strikes the carpeted floor. A small whirlwind whips out of the staff, ruffling hair, clothing, knocking a drapery off the wall. Madam M holds her fan to her face in shock, then grins at Aerith.

“Oh my, aren’t we full of hidden depths? Yes, very well. I’ll enter you, too.”

“I can fight,” Jessie offers, looking sad to be left out of the fun.

Madam M thinks and nods. “Yes, I think that will do nicely. So long as you don’t maim your pretty face, knowing if you can handle yourself will be worthwhile.”

Wedge opens his mouth to also offer to join the arena, but Madam M holds her fan up to his lips and silences him. “You will remain here. I have… another service for you.”

“What?” he asks in his raspy voice, though it squeaks a little with surprise.

Madam M reaches out to the nervous man and takes his hand in her delicate fingers. “Consider yourself collateral.” To Aerith and the others she says, “I will treat your handler with utmost respect and care, believe me. Now go. I’ll send word you’re on your way and you can make me proud. If you lose, well, best you don’t come begging.”

“Please don’t lose,” Wedge says.

“Buncha thugs in a pit?” Barret says, grinning. “Uh. Does the government show up to these underground fights?”

“Not in any capacity that will find you behind bars, I assure you.” She glances at his arm in the sling. “That isn’t going to cause any problems in the ring?”

“I’ll make do, Madam M. C’mon ladies, let’s go punch some bad guys.”

Barret sounds far too pleased with himself as he leaves the massage parlor. He casts a last glance back at Wedge and says, “Keep the lady entertained, yeah?”

“Oh, we’ll find something to occupy our hands,” Madam M says as the door shuts behind them all. Aerith shares a quizzical look with Jessie before they both chuckle and grin.

“He might not be the Don’s type, but someone has a use for little old Wedge,” Jessie jokes, and Barret barks an order from down the street.

“Shake your legs, we got a mission!”

It doesn’t take long for them to get to the arena, and after they confirm themselves as Madam M’s contestants--Horus Holtz, Aeris the Carbuncle, and just Strawberry--Barret calls them over to a corner of the big auditorium.

He says, “Okay, do either of you know what kinda nonsense this place throws out?”

Aerith shakes her head. “I didn’t actually know this was here.”

Jessie says, “Thugs, thieves, monsters, maybe a mech or two? Junkyard scrap piloted by junkyard scrap. I bet I can blow it all up with a couple well-placed explosives.”

“We should go in prepared, all the same,” Barret says, running his hand over the sheet-covered gun-arm. “Jessie, with me. Carbuncle, you stick right here. I’m gonna go find something that’ll be a little less high profile than ‘man with a gun for an arm’.”

“Sure thing, Horus.” Aerith grins at the sour face Barret gives her. “What, if we’re gonna have fake names, I’m damn sure gonna use them. Up top, Strawberry!” She throws Jessie a high five opportunity, and Jessie slaps the hand with gusto.

Barret shakes his head. “At least you’re in good spirits,” he mutters. “But seriously, stay put. We’ll be back before the first bout. Ain’t gonna let our Carbuncle fight alone.”

Aerith nods this time, and waits all of thirty seconds for them to be gone before poking her head out of the doors to the street. To her left is where they came from, and the sounds of excited gym guys working out. Across from the fighting arena is a bar of some sort, barely busy at this mid-afternoon hour, though there’s a lot of people hanging around. Refugees from Sector 7, she thinks. 

And to her right is a set of golden stairs that lead up, and then another set of stairs. Beyond that, a pagoda mansion leers above the rest of Wall Market, opulent in red and gold. This is the only other place in all of the underplate she has seen plants growing naturally, but even here the shrubs and bushes have an unhealthy grayish pallor to them. Somewhere in that strange mansion is Don Corneo, doing Planet knows what to Tifa. Beyond Don Corneo’s mansion is the open sky where the plate fell in. The open sky.

Aerith shudders. She’s always had a bit of an issue with the wide open sky. In theory, it’s a good thing. It makes plants grow, it feels warm on the skin, it contributes to the life cycle of every living thing on the planet at some level. And yet she has always felt disconnected from it. That it was other, alien. Not of the Planet. 

Not like Aerith is. Not like her people, the Cetra.

She shakes herself free of this thought and goes back inside to wait. They’ll win this tournament, get Madam M paid for services rendered, and get Jessie inside the mansion to find Tifa. It’s not a good plan, but it’s the only one that’s presented itself without causing a commotion they don’t want to cause.

As she steps back inside the arena auditorium, she hears an older man’s voice with an unfamiliar accent. “Now hold on a minute, Madam M didn’t say nothin’ about changing the roster.”

The event organizer he’s talking to says, “Yes, sir, it was a last minute replacement. If you’d like to sub in for your entry, you may do so as well. Andrea has opted to leave his entrants the same.”

The man, wearing a rancher style hat Aerith has only ever seen once before, and a fancy red leather vest over his white shirt, is Chocobo Sam. She saw him briefly driving the chocobo cart that carried Tifa to Wall Market, and she approaches him now.

As Sam is telling the organizer that he’ll stick with his usual tonight, he catches sight of Aerith watching him. “Thanks, mack,” he says to the organizer, “Let’s get a drink after the tournament, yeah?” The organizer smiles and nods. Sam approaches Aerith now and says, “Not polite to stare at strangers, Miss…?”

She remembers her slightly fake name just in time. “Aeris. Looks like I’m an opponent tonight.”

“Not of mine, just of my duly appointed representative. You a suit operator? You don’t look like much in a fight.”

“Something like that. You’re Chocobo Sam, right?”

He eyes her up and down and nods. “Well, you’ve introduced yourself, but I feel compelled to ask ‘who’s asking’ all the same. So, Aeris the Carbuncle,” he says, pointedly using the full fake name Barret put down on the organizer’s list, “What’s it to you?”

“Oh, nothing much, to be honest. We’re just trying to get in to see Don Corneo, and we heard only the Trio gets people in.”

“That we do. You got business with the Don? He’s a little hard to reach at the moment.” He’s being slightly cagey, and Aerith isn’t sure why.

“Checking on a friend, and in fact I think you brought her in. Tifa?”

The reaction is instantaneous and then covered just as quickly. “Sure, I remember Miss TIfa,” he says after hiding the shock of her name. “She’s not exactly the Don’s favorite new toy, if you follow my meaning.”

Gross. “But she was okay the last time you saw her?”

“Miss Tifa’s a fighter, she’s fine in there.” That mollifies Aerith a little bit and she’s happy to have something positive to pass on to Barret and Jessie. She intends to press him further, but he continues, “Trying to get in to see the Don, huh? You’re not really the type he goes for, but maybe tastes change. I could sponsor you, if you like.”

“Like you sponsored Tifa?”

“Sure. Probably do her good to see a friend in that place.” He grins. “But let’s make it interesting, huh? You and your pals beat me in the arena, I’ll sponsor you.”

“And if we lose?” Aerith asks.

“Well, Miss ‘the Carbuncle’, I expect you won’t have much in the way of leverage, then, will you?” He rubs his chin thoughtfully and says, “You lose, I’ll take that shiny materia in your weapon there. Deal?” Aerith holds her staff defensively behind her, but nods her head.

“We have an accord, then. Lookin’ real forward to what you do in the arena, Aeris.” 

He says something to the event organizer again, but Aerith can’t make out what it is. He grins at her and vanishes behind a VIP door, and Aerith hopes she’s made the right choice here. It would be good to get two of them inside Don Corneo’s mansion in case the place is really terrible. The time for the Corneo Cup tournament starts to close in, and Aerith pops her head out, worried that maybe she really would have to go out there and fight alone, but Barret and Jessie come strolling back up the main drag, and Jessie waves when she sees Aerith. Jessie’s got her trousers and some padded armor over a dark green shirt. Barret has also tied a dark green bandana around the new device on his gun-arm. Or rather, what used to be a gun. Now it’s a freaking buzz-saw.

When they get near enough, Aerith says, “We almost look like a team with all this green.” Her own blouse is near enough to the shade they found.

“Yeah, well, Jessie made a point that green is for the planet,” Barret says.

Aerith nods approvingly. “And I have about a thousand questions for that death sentence on your arm. I hope it’s got a safety or something.”

“I needed something I could fight with, and another gun wasn’t gonna cut it.”

“And if you don’t slice open your leg or side, I’ll be amazed,” Jessie says, sighing heavily. “Once he saw it, there was no talking him out of it.”

“Now we’ve got brute strength and armor shredding, magic, and bullets.” He nods to himself. “Whatever they throw at us, we’ll have a counter.”

“Good as anything, I guess,” Aerith says. “Listen.” She recounts the meetup with Chocobo Sam, how Tifa is apparently okay inside the mansion, and the deal she struck with him to be sponsored by him if they win. “I hope that’s okay? I was trying to help.”

Barret shakes his head. “I don’t like changing the plan before the plan’s really begun, but I don’t see that it hurts anything. It’s real nice to know she’s okay in there, though. I been punching myself about wasting all this time; now it’s not so bad.”

The organizer calls over to them. “Tournament’s about to begin. You’re up first, against the Thuggish Riot.”

“The who?” Jessie asks as the organizer points them to the contestant elevator behind him.

“Local ruffians. Enter every tournament, first to lose every time.”

“I don’t mind a cakewalk,” Barret says. “Any rules we should know about?”

They step onto the elevator and the organizer shakes his head. “If you hurt anyone important--well, don’t hurt anyone important.”

“Or we’re disqualified?” Aerith asks. 

“To put it mildly.” He runs a finger across his throat as the elevator doors close.

“Great,” Jessie says in the sudden silence before the elevator begins its descent. “What if we have to fight someone important?”

Barret scoffs as the lift moves downwards. “Ain’t no one gonna be in that pit with us but thugs, mercenaries, and ex-military.”

Aerith nods. “Like us, they’ll have proxies doing their fighting for them.”

The elevator comes to a stop and they step out into a large hall, with grandiose double doors tall and wide enough to fit a train through. There are several smaller doors along the path, with various levels of pomp and circumstance attached to them. Madam M’s assigned room is decorated lavishly with flowers and assorted gift baskets filled with food and drink. 

Another person calls them over to the large arena doors, though, and the moment hits Aerith. They’re going into organized combat with almost no prior knowledge of who they’re going to face. Thuggish Riot first. 

“Wait for the announcer,” the man says in front of the doors. “This everyone? No battle suits? No mech armor? I’ll bet on you for the first round. The Riot crew’s just the opening act, no one really loses against them.”

“You best keep your card full of this team,” Barret says, “‘Cause we ain’t leaving here without a gold medal.”

The man snorts laughter. “If we gave medals, you still wouldn’t get the gold. I heard Sam’s gonna test out his new toys tonight.”

Chocobo Sam. The rat. What kind of toys did the man have? 

“Toys break,” Jessie says, giving Aerith and Barret a thumbs up. They return the gesture.

“I like your confidence. I hope you keep it.”

The low hum of the crowd beyond these doors quiets. A booming voice shouts from the speaker system, “Ladies and not-so-gentle men, thank you all for coming to another Corneo Cup!” Applause and yells greet this and Aerith rolls her shoulders, limbering up for what’s about to come. Jessie hops up and down, psyching herself up and adjusting the holster and bandolier for her weapons and ammo. Barret yanks a cord on his buzz-saw, which roars to life before sputtering to an idle position, the blades of the saw vibrating gently with anticipation. He grins viciously.

The voice continues once the crowd volume lowers again. “I am your announcer for this evening’s festivities, Kotch! Sadly, my compatriot Scotch has moved on to bigger and better things, but rest assured, we’ll keep everything else the same! For tonight’s Corneo Cup, we have some returning champs, some new toys, some old favorites, and maybe even some. New. Blood.”

This last is met with applause and laughter, and Aerith wonders what the joke is. New blood must not do well.

Kotch continues, “First up, welcome back to the arena those underdogs with the underbite, those little thugs who could, the record holders for most losses in a row, Thuggish Riot!”

Kotch is very good at vamping the crowd, and doors open elsewhere to major applause and cheers as what sounds like a whole gang of ruffians takes to the arena floor. Engines rev. Fire roars. Guns bang, causing Aerith to jump. 

“How many are there in the Thuggish Riot?” she asks the event handler on this side of the doors.

“Varies week to week, sounds like they got a good dozen out there today, though. Still cocky?”

“It could be two dozen and we’ll still be walking out with the W,” Barret says. His confidence, his swagger, bolsters Aerith. It’s crazy to think they won’t just get swarmed and overwhelmed, but if he thinks they’ll be fine, then damn sure they’ll be fine.

Once the crowd dies down, Kotch says, “There are so many of you tonight! Let’s hope our next contestants, our newwwww blood, can withstand the fury!” Invoking “new blood” again causes the crowd to scream and laugh. Kotch continues, “We don’t have much info on them, but representing the lovely Madam M in the arena tonight, we have a deadly trio! With names like this, how deadly can they be? Let’s give a great big Corneo Cup welcome to the newest of blood: Horus Holtz, Aeris the Carbuncle, and Strawberry!”

Unseen mechanisms slide into place, and the big double doors begin to swing open. The crowd boos as spotlights shine through the opening doors, blinding them momentarily as they walk through. They enter into chaos. The arena is massive, covered in sand and half a dozen thugs in leather jackets and spikes. Tattoos and piercings. One has a pistol. The others have spiked wood, steel rebar, a chunk of concrete. Scavenged weapons all. Beyond them, revving motorcycle engines and spraying sand with tires, three more thugs wielding chains and nets. And behind those three, a hulking figure of a man. Not as wide as Barret, but certainly a little taller. 

Ten in total. The trio of Aerith, Jessie, and Barret step out beyond the doors, which swing shut behind them with a _chunk_ and _click_ of locking metal. Aerith whispers, “I hope you have a plan.”

Jessie shrugs. “My plans involve fuses and throwing things.”

Before they can continue, Kotch yells, “Let’s hope their bite is bigger than their bark, or we might see an upset with the Thuggish Riot moving on to the second round for, well, the first time all year! Let. The. Rampage. BEGIN!”

All is lost in bedlam and sound. The motorcycles rev their engines and speed off around the outside of the arena. They’re certainly showmen, Aerith thinks.

Jessie pulls the pin on a small grenade and hucks it at the center of the six goons advancing on them. They scatter, but it doesn’t explode. Instead, it shoots out smoke, filling the center of the arena. They begin stumbling out of the opaque smoke, coughing and laughing, but that’s all the hesitation the three of them need.

Barret charges in, buzz-saw whining, and cuts right through the rebar weapon one of them carries, then kicks out at his chest, knocking him prone. Jessie draws her pistol and fires at the one aiming his own gun down on her. Metal spangs off metal and the gun in his hand goes flying. She wastes no time and sprints into the melee as another thug comes out, holding a chunk of concrete. He swings at her, and she rolls under it, punching at the back of the man’s knee as she goes. He drops into a crouch and then a second guy collides with him, thrown by Barret. They collapse into a pile.

Aerith holds her staff out in front of her. She’s not entirely sure what this materia combination is going to do, but two of the thugs advance on her, one with steel rebar and one with a piece of jagged wood with railroad spikes sticking out of it. She swings the staff in a large arc to force them to keep their distance. She’s not thinking about activating the materia, but when she strikes out, a wall of wind follows the arc, buffeting them both and knocking them back. Aerith grins.and holds out her staff, daring them to come for her.

They look at each other, spread out even more, and charge. Aerith backs away, nearly getting sideswiped by one of the motorcycles in her haste to retreat, and thinks about other things she might be able to do with this wind materia in her staff.

She holds the weapon like a sword and concentrates on the materia this time, swings out with it, imagining the arc of her strikes as blades of wind. The air pressure changes as the air around her sucks into itself, becomes sharp as a knife, and strikes one of the thugs across the chest, cutting his shirt and skin. The other closes in while the first falls back in surprise, clutching his bleeding chest. Jessie fortunately leaps onto the other thug’s back and boxes his ears, then cuffs him just above the neck with her pistol so that he falls unconscious to the ground. She winks at Aerith and turns back to the threat.

The regular thugs now dealt with, the motorcycle crew spins their tires and rushes in, while the big guy in the corner yells triumphantly and charges towards Barret.

Barret holds out his buzz-saw like he’s going to shoot, then scoffs when he remembers it’s not a gun right now. The motorcycles swarm around them, keeping them contained, and they back up next to each other while the big guy approaches.

“Fun times,” Jessie says.

“We’re still alive, ain’t we?” Barret replies.

“For how much longer?” Aerith asks.

“Long as we got a chance to see our girl again. _Gryah!_ ” Barrel growls as a motorcycle comes a bit too close. He jukes toward the machine and throws his buzz-saw out towards its tire. Scream of metal meets scream of man as the buzz-saw eats through the tire and then the frame. The man flies off the machine, collides with the wall of the arena, and falls still.

The other two motorcycles match up with the big guy and they rush in. Jessie lobs another grenade, which goes wide and misses. Aerith reaches into her pouch and pulls out the lightning materia, then concentrates on the motorcycle bearing down on her. A bolt of electric blue arcs out of her hand and into the engine, igniting it and shorting it out. The man tips the bike and they crash to the sand. 

The grenade that Aerith thought Jessie missed with goes off, and instead of a normal explosion or a puff of smoke, the air around the grenade warps and sucks in on itself. It’s close enough to the other motorcycle still that it yanks the bike backwards, pulling the guy off as the bike flips backwards and crunches into a ball. The man looks at what was almost him and crabwalks back to the big guy, who roars and engages in melee with Barret.

Aerith yells, “What the hell was that?” as she pops her guy across his mildly electrocuted face with the staff, knocking him out.

“Gravity well!” Jessie calls back, “A Jessie Special!”

The fight between Barret and the massive thug is a slugfest. Barret swings out with his regular fist, and the man doesn’t even try to dodge or block. He takes the fist with a slight grunt and throws his own fist into Barret’s chin, which staggers him back a little, but he grins and takes it. 

Barret roars, “Hell yeah! Let’s do this!” and throws another massive swing. Aerith and Jessie hang back, wary of the last smaller thug watching this play out on the other side of the arena. 

Punch after punch, neither man giving in. Aerith winces with each swing against Barret’s face or chest, but nothing seems to stop him. A man on a mission. Driven to complete through the pain.

Aerith says to Jessie, “Should we help? I feel bad.”

“Nah, it’s a point of pride now. If we help him stop the big guy, we’ll never hear the end of him sulking.”

“Seems ridiculous. We still have more fights after this.”

“I never said it made sense.” Jessie shrugs. “We can go kick the hell out of the little guy?”

“Sounds like a plan.” They stalk forward, moving around Barret and the thug as their punches slow and their exhaustion mounts. Before Jessie and Aerith take more than a few steps on the other side, Barret winds up one last massive swing, an uppercut, and the big thug’s jaw cracks as he flies up and away, only to land on the little thug, where they both roll over each other, unconscious.

And the fight is over, just like that.

The crowd erupts in screams and cheers, which is the first time Aerith has heard them since the fight began. Focusing on not dying can do that, she supposes. Images of Barret, Jessie, and Aerith flash across large screens, with their fake names. Kotch is partway through his aftermatch announcements when the doors open back up and the three of them are free to head out and wait for their next match.

Kotch says, “I gotta say, I really didn’t expect much from these three, but that’ll teach me to question Madam M’s judgment, huh? Let’s give a big round of applause for Horus, Strawberry, and the Carbuncle!”

More applause follows them out. Barret bleeds freely from the nose but he’s got a big grin as he waves at the crowd, cycles up his buzz-saw for good measure, and the big doors shut behind them.

One fight down. One step closer to their goal. 

One less obstacle between them and Tifa.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: A frightful fight, a fateful meeting.  
> "Chapter 8 - Reunion" will post in a few days!


	8. Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aerith, Jessie, and Barret fight something hellish in the Corneo Cup, all in an effort to find their way in to Don Corneo's palace to find Tifa. 
> 
> Tifa and Aerith meet, at long last.

“Okay, hold on,” Aerith says, digging in her satchel for the curative materia. “Just. Let’s go into Madam M’s room and let me do something about this. You’re a mess.”

Barret winces but lets himself be dragged towards the room. “You should see the other guy.”

Jessie thumps his buzz-saw arm. “You only get to say that if we weren’t there!”

“Were y’all there? I didn’t notice.” But he smiles at them. It was an easy fight, despite it all. “Those Thuggish Riot fools really weren’t nothin’, were they?”

Aerith gets him settled into a bench seat at a table while Jessie gets a towel and wets it down. “It’s likely going to get harder from here,” Aerith says, “so we need to rest up while we can and take care of this whole thing. I’m pretty sure your nose is broken.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he says. Jessie cleans him up against his protestations, and Aerith holds the materia up to his face. “Whoa, hold on now, don’t need you burning my beard off.”

She deadpan stares him down. “This’ll help, just sit still.” He does, and Jessie stands back once his face has been cleaned up.

She concentrates on the materia, and that familiar green cooling sensation radiates out from the orb, from her hand, and she directs it into Barret.

“That tickles,” he says.

“I can probably make it hurt, if you prefer,” Aerith threatens, and he quiets down.

“Don’t mess with the nurse,” Jessie says. “Everyone knows that.”

After a few seconds of channeling this healing energy, she pants and wipes sweat from her face as she drops onto the bench next to Barret. He sits up and feels the tender flesh around his nose, the puffed up cheeks, and grins.

“Don’t hurt now. Too bad Cloud never showed us how to use that stuff.”

Aerith is drained from helping Barret, even more so than from the fight. She says, “Do you have anything we can attach some to? There’s more here than I can use myself in a single fight.”

Barret shrugs and holds up the steel bracer on his arm. “This thing can take one, but last time I tried to put it in, it damn near froze my arm off.”

Jessie says, “My normal gear had room for one, but we left it behind to remain incognito.” She shrugs as she sits down to check over her pistol. “I got my fancy grenades, though, so it’s whatever.”

Aerith nods. “Well, here, let’s see if we can’t find you something that likes you more than the cold one,  _ Horus _ .” Aerith reaches her hand into the satchel, withdrawing several green materia. The fire, ice, lightning, and a poison one she hasn’t had time to test yet.

“Why you talkin’ about ‘em like they got feelings?” he asks, flicking the fire one, which rolls across the table before Aerith stops it.

“Materia is just another form that comes from the planet. Is it so hard to believe it might have a personality? A preference?”

Barret scoffs. “Just crystallized Mako.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Here, let’s try this one.” She holds out the fire materia and he takes it in his big palm. Where Aerith can hold one in the palm of her hand, Barret’s meaty fist is large enough to get a second in there, if he was careful.

“So I just shove it in, yeah? Awful big for it to fit in this tiny slot.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, but essentially.” Aerith grabs her staff and concentrates on the wind materia, so that it slides free from its socket. It almost seems to grow larger as it plops out and into Aerith’s hand. “I don’t know the exact way it works, but the materia interfaces with the tech inside, and draws some of its power into the weapon, or armor, or whatever. Shinra’s gotten very good at channeling it into their robots for laser weapons.”

“Damn right they have,” Barret says. He holds the fire materia up close to the socket on his bracer, and for a moment it seems like nothing is going to happen. Then it pops into place, and tiny circuitry around the bracer glows a steady green.

Then the whole contraption begins to glow red-hot and he seethes. “See what I mean? Damn stuff hates me.” He manages to extract the materia again before it can hurt him.

Aerith purses her lips in thought. “Maybe there’s something wrong with your bracer?”

“This thing is fine. It’s materia that’s broken.” He sulks, covering the bracer protectively. 

Jessie says, “I’ve checked it out before, nothing’s wrong with the electronics or anything.”

“Hmm,” Aerith says, biting her lower lip in concentration. “Well, what if we just try the rest and see what’s up?”

Barret shrugs. “If my arm turns into lightning or something, I’m blaming you.”

“You’ll be fine. Probably.” Aerith reaches for the lightning materia, then thinks better of it, and instead hands him the one that gives her queasy feelings. “Try this one.”

“Which one’s this? Acid?” Barret holds it up to inspect it.

“I think it’s poison? You should know pretty quick if it’s gonna do the same thing.”

He eyes her askance, but slots the materia into place all the same. Nothing happens for a moment, and he examines his arm thoughtfully. “I don’t feel any different.” Then immediately his eyes droops and he says, “Oh, wait, I think I’m gonna throw up.” He reaches for the materia, and it slides out as he pants, recovering.

“That was the worst one. I feel like I just had alcohol poisoning or something.”

Aerith has another idea, though. “Okay, one sec.” She reaches up to the bow in her hair and extracts the little ball of white materia she carries with her everywhere.

“What’s this one? Never seen white before,” Jessie says as Barret reaches out to take it.

“I don’t like bein’ a guinea pig, Carbuncle.”

“This one came from my mother. I’ve never been able to make it do anything.”

“Huh.” Barret holds it in his grip. “This one’s… warm. Not hot, but like… inviting?”

Aerith smiles. “I always thought of it as welcoming, too.”

He slots it into his bracer, and clenches his teeth, waiting for it to do whatever it’s going to do. And Aerith also tenses up. What if this reveals what it’s for after all these years? Her heart pounds and she waits.

And waits.

“This one really doesn’t feel like anything,” Barret says. “Except tingly, like that inviting warmth is inside me now.” He smiles, and then frowns. “I don’t like it. Can we take it out?”

“Well, concentrate on activating the materia first,” Aerith says. “Think about hitting the training dummy in the corner.”

Barret stands up and holds his arm out, face scrunching up in concentration. Nothing happens, and he shrugs. “Least this one’s not trying to kill me.”

An announcement over the intercom blares out, “Madam M’s contestants, next round is beginning. Proceed to the arena doors. Forfeiture in three minutes.”

“Damn,” Barret says, sliding the white materia out and handing it back to Aerith. “They must be churning through the fights.”

Aerith eyes her staff, with the blue materia and the windy materia. If the white materia truly does something, will that bring it out? “Sorry we couldn’t solve your materia issue, Barret. You guys go ahead, I’ll catch up in a sec.”

Jessie nods, shoveling all the materia back into Aerith’s satchel and taking a final drink of water. “Don’t be late; kind of everything is counting on it.”

“I’ll be there.” She stands there, waiting for them to leave the room, and then she swaps the white materia for the wind that’s already in her staff. Immediately she feels that welcoming warmth, but nothing else. She holds the staff in both hands, concentrating all her will into the white materia. Feels that warmth that reminds her of her mother. 

And nothing happens.

Nothing, that is, except the shadow creatures appear before her. They haven’t been around for a while, and she falls backwards in surprise as one hovers over the table where the staff is.

The white materia shoots out of the staff and clunks against the table before rolling onto the ground. Aerith scoops it up and holds it protectively while several of the wraiths swirl around her in what she can only call angry. 

“What do you want from me?” she calls, but once she’s no longer focusing on using the white materia, the shadows dissipate. She stares at the white materia once they’ve gone. Why would the shadows show up when she is trying to use that materia? 

She sighs and places it back inside the bow in her hair, grabs her staff and inserts the fire materia alongside the blue one this time, and rushes out to meet her companions.

“I was just about to send Jessie back in for ya,” Barret says, “Everythin’ good?”

“Just changing up my kit. I’m ready. Who are we facing this time, do we know?”

Jessie says, “Organizer says it’s semi-finals. Not much of a tournament, if you ask me, but this one’s against Andrea’s usual. He only laughed when I asked what that meant.”

“Lovely.”

“Don’t matter. We smacked down the thugs, we’ll knock the block off whatever this other Trio guy can throw at us.”

Aerith and Jessie nod. The next event begins with Kotch announcing Andrea’s houndmaster and his guard hounds, whatever those are. She hopes they are real dogs and not some kind of mechanical thing. The audience cheers for them, even louder than any of the other announcements, and Aerith figures they must be fan favorites.

Their announcement comes through, and it seems like Kotch has settled on calling them Horus, Strawberry, and the Carbuncle as their shorthand. The guy at the door says, “You did good last time, but I think I’m gonna bet on the dogs. They don’t really lose.”

“Your money to throw away,” Barret says, “We’re goin’ all the way.”

The doors open as they are announced, and they step out into the now-familiar arena to cheers and boos, scattered applause. They’ve made an impression, but Andrea’s houndmaster is clearly popular. He’s a handsome, tall, dark-skinned man with a vicious grin and safari clothing, as if he’s stepped out of one of those Corel Desert adventures on TV. Arrayed around him are half a dozen large hounds, midnight black--like panthers. Three are the size of large mastiffs, and three are more like lions.

Aerith doesn’t want to hurt animals, but these dogs are clearly trained killers and it’s going to take ruthlessness to get through this. No mercy for the houndmaster who uses innocent creatures as weapons of war, though. She’ll cry over the dogs later.

Kotch vamps the crowd some more, and the fight begins.

It is blessedly short. Barret knocks the houndmaster out despite two of the creatures latching on to him with their fangs. One has latched on to his leg, and the other swings from his buzz-saw arm, dangerously close to the spinning blades. Jessie drops a stun grenade into the center of the three big ones. They snarl and back away, but the damage is done and they drop one by one.

Aerith singes one of them with a well-placed ball of fire, enough to warn him but not enough to kill. She pelts the sands in front of the dogs with fire, scorching it into glassy slag. With the houndmaster knocked out, the dogs don’t have a direction, and the remaining ones are tranquilized or knocked out in less than a minute. 

The fight ends, with Aerith panting and on the point of tears. Barret bleeds openly from new wounds on his leg. Jessie retches in the corner and wipes her mouth, probably from the smell of scorched dog hair and flesh. Kotch comes back over the speakers, “I can hardly believe it! The hounds and their master, deftly defeated in ninety seconds! That might be a record from our very surprising new contestants! Give it up once more for Horus, Strawberry, and the Carbuncle!”

There are cheers and boos as they leave the arena, Barret limping. Aerith doesn’t feel good about this fight at all, and when the organizer on the other side of the door curses at them for winning, she sets a little fireball under his feet. He falls backward, patting out the flames on his melting boots. No permanent damage, but he got a good scare.

“Bad luck to bet against the Carbuncle,” Barret says, but without humor. They go into Madam M’s contestant room and sit down.

“That was rough,” Jessie says.

“We’ve had to kill some hounds against Shinra before,” Barret says. “But you’re right. This is different.”

Aerith quietly sets about curing Barret’s wounds. They’re deep punctures in his legs, and they weep blood while she concentrates, but after a few minutes of intense and exhausting healing, the wounds have sealed over. They’re not perfectly fine. This materia can’t undo damage, only accelerate healing, and she feels pretty much spent for now.

“Glad no one else got hurt,” she says, panting and downing some kind of energy drink from the in-room vending machine. “I don’t think I could heal someone else right now.”

“What do you think we’re up against next?” Jessie asks. “I don’t think I can fight more animals, not even Mako mutants if they’re crazy enough to have them.”

Aerith shakes her head. “I don’t know what he’s got, but if we’re up against Chocobo Sam next, people keep referring to his new toys. Could be guns. Could be… armored chocobos, for all we know.”

“I ain’t killing chocobos, for damn sure,” Barret says. 

Jessie nods. “Yeah, that’s not anything anybody wants.”

Aerith frowns. “I think the better question is, ‘Do we think Sam is evil enough to use chocobos that way?’” 

“He gives women to that scumbag Don Corneo,” Barret says. “But I really don’t know.”

They aren’t given long to rest or talk, as the intercom comes back on, calling for them. Three minute mark.

“Already?” Aerith complains. “We just got done fighting.” She stands up, but her body aches and she feels sluggish. All that healing for Barret has taken it out of her.

“If last time was the semi-finals,” Jessie says, “this should be it. We beat them and we win. Madam M sends me along, and Chocobo Sam gives you the go-ahead.”

Barret claps Aerith on the shoulder. “You got one more in you, Carbuncle?”

“Maybe if I hang back for the first minute or so.” She stretches and jumps up and down to get her blood pumping. “I’m sure adrenaline will kick in when we go out there and see what horrors Sam has in store for us.”

Barret chuckles. “That’s the spirit. We’ll be done with this part before you know it.”

Aerith thinks about people calling them Sam’s new toys. She thinks about the absolutely massive doors. The lightning would seem to be the logical choice, if he’s got some kind of machine. And yet he’s got chocobos. He’s a farmer of sorts. She makes a last minute materia switch, a long shot bet. They head out and the same guy Aerith burned the shoes of is standing there, glaring at them.

“I could have you kicked out for assaulting me, you know.”

“I could make it worth getting kicked out,” Aerith says.

The guy cringes back, but chooses instead to smile. “No, I think I’m gonna bet on you this time. Even after that last upset, you three are long odds to beat Chocobo Sam.”

“What’s he got out there?” Jessie asks, adjusting her grenades. She’s running low after two fights.

“You’re about to find out.”

Kotch comes blasting out of the speaker systems, “After a night of surprises and upsets, are you ready for your final bout of the evening?” The cheering crowd amplifies. “First, our challengers. They showed up and wowed us against Thuggish Riot, and then absolutely blew us away with a record-breaking destruction of Andrea’s Hounds--don’t worry, they’re all fine, folks. But now they’ll face their toughest opponent yet. And I have been assured that what you’re used to seeing from Chocobo Sam is nothing like what’s gonna walk through that door in a minute.”

SIlence falls over the crowd and Kotch continues, “Representing Madam M in the arena tonight, welcome back Horus, Strawberry, and the Carbuncle!” The doors open once again and the three fighters walk out to cheers, jeers, boos, catcalls. It’s deafening. Kotch says, “And would you believe me if I told you Strawberry’s NOT the cute one?”

A live feed of Jessie’s face appears on the monitors, along with Strawberry, and she huffs good-naturedly. This elicits a new series of cheers for them, and Aerith grins. That was mean, but this Kotch certainly knows how to hype a crowd.

Kotch says, “With the highest win record to date, Chocobo Sam has decided that tonight’s the night he unveils his newest combatant. This ain’t no junky sweeper or jury-rigged cutter, no sirree. Put your hands together for the--hold on, am I reading this right?” The doors open while he’s trying to figure out if whatever he’s looking at is a mistake, and only darkness is on the other side.

Two lights appear, high up, maybe fifteen feet. Like the soft candle flame of eyes. A whine begins to ramp up, and it isn’t until it becomes a roar that Aerith recognizes it for what it is. Flames roil off the back of whatever this is, lighting up the silhouette of this thing.

And it’s a confusing sight.

It rockets out of the doors, revealing what appears to be an animatronic  _ house _ . Metal arms with clamps on the ends. Treads for it to move around. It’s like a tank in the shape of an angry home. It’s absurd and it’s coming right at them.

Aerith throws herself to the right while Barret and Jessie dodge left. It rushes through the space they just occupied and crashes against the arena wall beyond them, its large rocket turbines fizzling from its jet engine charge.

Kotch suddenly yells, “Holy shit, it is! Ladies and gentlemen, Sam’s outdone himself again, because this is the wildest thing I’ve ever seen! Good luck, fighters, because you’re up against the Heeeeeeell Hooooooooouse!”

“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me!” Barret yells while they regroup. “It’s a house?”

Jessie shrugs. “I wanna be surprised, but honestly, why not?”

Aerith stares at her incredulously while the Hell House rotates, clacking and whistling. This thing is heaving and shaking like some kind of living machine, and Aerith gets a very bad feeling from it.

She says, “Whatever it is, I think it’s also alive somehow.”

Barret spits on the sand. “They say get your house in order, but this is a little ridiculous.”

Jessie snorts laughter, but Aerith doesn’t think it’s funny. “We have to put it out of its misery. Whatever Sam did to that thing, it’s an abomination.”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll strip its walls bare. Any idea how to even fight the damn thing?”

Aerith holds her staff up. “I have an idea. You can probably slow it down with that buzz-saw. Jessie, if that thing’s windows are its eyes, maybe you can blind it with a smoke grenade?”

“Good a plan as any. Here it comes!” Barret charges at the front of the house while its arms clank and spin and its tread drags it forward. Without its rockets propelling it, it is slower, but could still overtake them if they aren’t careful. 

Barret tries to flank the house so he can attack the treads, but it manages to shuffle fast enough to match his speed. Jessie takes aim at the windows and shoots them out, which only makes flame boil out of them like the fires of a furnace. Aerith wishes suddenly she had put the ice materia in her weapon, but no time in the middle of a fight.

With its window-eyes shot out, it still seems perfectly capable of tracking their every move. Barret jukes around the thing, but it swats him away with one of its metallic pincers. He grunts when he lands and rolls a bit. Then the treads malform into skittering spider legs and dance around for a moment before launching it up into the sky. It comes down where Barret landed, and he just barely rolls free of it before it crashes down, spraying sand everywhere.

Barret manages to get to his feet and swing out the buzz-saw at one of the legs, chewing through the metal and disabling some of its mobility. The crazy house lowers down, almost protectively, and Barret starts to run back in before Aerith hears something wind up inside it. Something combustible.

“Get clear!” she yells. Barret stops and jogs backwards away from it while Jessie comes up next to Aerith. 

“What’s the actual plan?” Jessie shouts while the house spins in place, spewing flame in every direction. They can feel the heat from here, and Barret covers his eyes, but they’re safe for the moment.

Aerith says, “Well, a house has an inside, right? Its windows are broken, the door flaps open and shut. Shouldn’t be too hard to get a proper grenade in there.”

“I like where your mind’s at, Carbuncle. I got one left, though, so we gotta make it count.”

Barret backs up to them now while the house slows and its flamethrower gutters and dies. “I seen a lot of weird in my time, but this is definitely up there. What’s next?”

“Next is Jessie blows this thing to pieces. We’re the bait and she’ll get the grenade inside.” Aerith nods at the other two and they nod back. 

The house’s door opens suddenly, and a little green something pops out of it, rolls, and then stands up, brandishing a wicked-looking knife. The creature is smooth and dark green, wearing a tiny brown cloak and carrying a small lantern in its other hand. Big yellow eyes train on Jessie and it begins to shuffle toward her.

“Well what the hell is that?” she asks.

“The things that live in the house?” Aerith suggests. It swings its knife threateningly, but it is exceedingly slow and Aerith isn’t sure they should worry about it.

“Plan don’t change,” Barret says. “Avoid the little guy, blow up the house.”

In the moment they’re not looking at the little green creature, though, it vanished. Aerith glances around, sees it step out of a rip of nothingness behind Jessie, silent as the grave, and raise the knife to her back.

Aerith throws herself at Jessie, pushing her to safety and nearly taking the knife in her chest. She falls backwards from it, and the little creature looks confused that it didn’t hit anything. Jessie pulls Aerith back and to her feet, and the little guy starts shuffling forward towards Jessie again.

“Sneaky little guy, huh?” Jessie says.

“Uh, the house is doing a thing again,” Barret says, but before they can register what it’s doing, the house plants itself firmly in the sand, opens its door, and a sucking whirlwind of sound hits them. Barret holds himself steady against it, but Aerith and Jessie struggle out in the open. Jessie loses her footing first, and tumbles back toward the house, crying out. Barret manages to grab onto her and hold her stable, but Aerith isn’t so lucky.

She slips first, digging her staff into the sand, which only causes her to lose balance faster when it doesn’t catch on anything. She feels herself first lose the ground before getting sucked toward the house. Her fingers barely miss Jessie’s as they pass, and Aerith has a brief moment to see inside the house before she is ripped through the doorway and tumbles to a mess of sticky, viscous fluid. This is not a proper house, but some kind of mouth? Where did the little green guy come from, then? She doesn’t have time to figure that out as the walls accordion around her, press against her, and she drops her staff. 

They smash into her, almost like the house is chewing, and she cries out at the pummeling pain as this thing tries to crush her into a fine paste. But the inner walls of this creature avoid something entirely. Her staff. Her staff with the long shot materia inside it. 

The poisonous materia.

She grabs the staff from the undulating ground and waves it around. Everywhere the end of the staff draws near, the walls press back from it. She grins and looks for a throat, finds the dark heart of nothingness farther within this strange creature, and uses all her strength to shove the staff into the soft mass. It immediately recoils, and gags, but the damage is done. The poison spreads inside this creature.

She tries to pull the staff free, but is instead ejected in a cacophony of sound back onto the sand, where the door slams shut and it backs away from her, almost whimpering.

Jessie shouts, “I told you she wasn’t dead!” as Barret crushes the little green monster under his fist, and kicks the body away, lifeless. 

“I never said she was!” But the relief in both their eyes is telling enough. They thought she was gone for sure.

Hell, Aerith thought she was done for.

She lost her staff in the process, though. The house backs into a corner of the arena, its smoke and flames green and guttering, its metal pincers swiping weakly in front of it. The thing might not be dying, but it sure isn’t having a good time.

“What’d you do to it?” Jessie asks.

“That blue materia came in handy, I guess. It’s sucking on a poison pill right now.”

Barret laughs as they regroup. “The little guy packs a punch.” He turns and the giant knife sticks out of Barret’s shoulder while he winces. “Ain’t no pulling it out yet, then I’ll just be bleedin’.”

Aeirth sucks in a breath at how painful that looks, but he’s holding up well.

The Hell House is not looking so hale, though. It sputters green flame, its door flapping open and shut with each concussive blast of air, as if it’s coughing. Finally, after several agonizing seconds of this, the door slams open and her staff flies out of it, coming to rest in the sand in front of it.

Jessie doesn’t waste any time, and pulls the pin on her last grenade. “Better finish this thing off before it rallies, yeah?”

But the door closes once more and it drags itself away from the three of them. Already it’s beginning to look stronger, and Aerith isn’t sure what they’ll need to do to get it to open back up.

Aerith instead grabs inside her satchel, fishing for the wind materia. “Get ready!” she yells, charging at the house as its green flames turn bright red and orange again. Barret gives chase, and Jessie follows behind, ready with the grenade. 

The house, angry and growing stronger now that it’s not actively being poisoned from within, opens its mouth again. Not to suck anything in, or throw any creatures out, but to expel a roiling cloud of flame bearing down on them.

Aerith concentrates, holding the wind materia out like a talisman against evil, and presses with all her will against the flames and the hot gust of air charging at her.

Barret backs her up as she nearly loses her balance and falls. He buffets her against the onrushing fury of wind as she fights against the torrent with her materia and her willpower. A sustained blast of air whooshes from her hand, erratically waving around as she struggles to keep it focused. If she loses her aim, or the creature manages to redouble its own efforts, this could end very quickly and very badly.

But she yells, “Throw the damn bomb!” and Jessie doesn’t hesitate. The grenade arcs over Barret and Aerith’s heads, coming down inside the vortex of wind Aerith is pushing towards the wall of flame. She yells, pushing with everything she has, willing the materia to amp up like she managed with the lightning during the Turks fight on the pillar. And it responds in kind. 

The grenade, mere seconds from exploding, twists and turns in the whirlwind that suddenly becomes a tornado, spinning out of control and rushing out to meet the Hell House’s flames. The grenade vanishes inside the swirling winds, and the tornado envelops the house, tearing it to shreds from the outside. 

Then the grenade explodes, sending viscous blood and house shrapnel flying. Aerith covers her eyes as she lets the tornado go. Barret protects her with his body and they wait out the carnage.

The Hell House whines and boils in its death throes, but with the fire and the wind dying down, all that remains is a creature that never should have been, returning to the planet where Aerith hopes it might finally be at peace.

It slumps and settles into a pile of rubble and death. All is silent in the arena.

Then Kotch’s voice says, “Ladies and gentlemen, your winners of the Corneo Cup! Look at them, stunned it’s over, and who can blame them! They just fought a house! The Hell House!”

The rest is lost in applause and cheers. Aerith takes a moment to catch her breath, then waves gaily to the crowd, high fives Jessie and Barret before remembering that Barret has a knife sticking out of his back. She rushes them from the arena to tend his wounds, content to listen to the crowd cheering their victory.

Once they have healed up, cleaned up, and Jessie pockets the weird creature’s butcher’s knife for herself, Chocobo Sam shows up at Madam M’s room. “Reckon I underestimated you lot,” he says. “You did for my newest toy what I thought might take months.”

Aerith glares at him. “You’re lucky we had a deal, because otherwise I might be making  _ you _ choke on a poison staff right now. Whatever you did to that thing was horrible. Nothing deserves that kind of torment.”

He scoffs, and then when it looks like he’s about to argue, he hesitates. “Maybe you’re right, Aeris. I’m surely not gonna belabor the point after you just beat me, anyway. Deal’s a deal, as they say.”

Aerith, only a little mollified by his admission that she might be right, nods. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any fancy clothing I can change into?”

He grins. “Now that certainly wasn’t part of the deal,” he drawls, “but I have a notion what’s gonna tickle the Don tonight, so I’ll have something sent over. You’re in for a strange night, folks.” He tips his hat politely, turns, and then stops. “Almost forgot. Big man, the other member of the Trio, Andrea, has requested a meeting.”

“Just me?” Barret asks.

“He said to send along the brute. I don’t question our good Andrea, so maybe you better shake a leg over to the Honeybee Inn, introduce yourself.”

Barret considers, rolling his shoulder from what little bit of healing Aerith was able to provide. “He say why?” 

“Just that you’ve caught his eye. I expect you’ll be better off for taking the meeting. Andrea’s not like the rest of us scoundrels. Heart of gold and all that. You’ll be fine, big fella.”

He takes his leave, then, and Barret grumbles. “Guess I should go, huh?”

“Might be worth it for the resistance,” Jessie says. “I should probably get back to Madam M and whatever she’s doing to Wedge, so she can doll me up.”

Aerith nods. “I’d go with, but I guess I should wait here for whatever outfit Chocobo Sam sends me.”

“Okay,” Barret says, standing up and clearing his throat. “Y’all best get prepared to go into this Don Corneo’s place and find Tifa. I’ll go meet this Andrea, and we can get situated before you head in, yeah?”

They agree, and Aerith waves them away. She’s tired, but the good kind of tired where her body is taxed and ready to turn in for the night. She expects she’ll sleep well despite all the craziness going on these days. And soon enough, she’s going to help find Tifa, rescue her if necessary, and kill this curiosity she’s built up around the woman. She’s just another pretty face, so why is Aerith so nervous suddenly? Maybe it has to do with Cloud. With having to witness her learn her childhood friend is dead.

Whatever the case, she is nervous, but excited.

Her outfit arrives from Sam, and she eyes it curiously. Not exactly something a woman would wear to entice a mob boss, and she wonders if Sam is playing games with her. His own little revenge for losing.

But she doesn’t have anything else to put on, so she gets all cleaned up, dressed up, and heads out to meet Barret and Jessie, to see whatever she’s going to see in the night ahead.

*****

Donna Lockhart paces in the room that used to be Don Corneo’s. The room itself has been stripped down, sanitized, and rebuilt to look a little more respectable. Everything has been so crazy since she took over, she’s scarcely had time to breathe. This is the first night she’s told the Trio they can send her new people, with certain expectations on what they should look like and what attributes she’s interested in.

She doesn’t know who, if anyone, the Trio might send. She only knows that if they do send someone, and they don’t do something silly like try to kill her, this will be very good indeed. Part one of her rough plan needs warm bodies.

Would Barret approve of something like this? Of infiltration, deception, murder? She can’t really think like that. Barret didn’t approve of a lot of things, and now he’s dead, along with the rest of their shard of Avalanche and Sector 7. Tifa holds out a secret hope that maybe Cloud is alive out there, that he’ll somehow find out she’s here, that he’ll come and make everything better. Be the mercenary he’s supposed to be. Fulfill the promise he made to her all those years ago.

A knock at her chamber doors startles her. She clears her throat and says, “Enter.”

Leslie steps inside. “The Trio’s sent a full docket tonight. I saw them at the Corneo Cup earlier; they’re pretty legit.”

“Anything I should know about them?” Tifa asks.

Leslie shakes his head. “Just their stage names. They were going by Horus, Strawberry, and the Carbuncle, but they were good. Two were cute, too, if that matters.”

“What curious names,” she says. “But fighters, all of them?”

Leslie shakes his head. “Two were more traditional, looked like they were familiar with covert operations. The third, Carbuncle, she was slinging a lot of magic around. Materia’s not the easiest thing to come by, and she wasn’t hurting for it.”

Interesting. And she just now realizes that Cloud had all their materia when he fell from the reactor catwalks. That would have been useful going forward. She makes a mental note to acquire some.

“When will they be here?” she asks.

“They’re standing outside in the gardens, getting ready to come in. Are you ready?”

She takes a deep breath and nods. “Did Corneo have them perform or anything before choosing?”

“When there was more than one, he’d line them up and treat them like cattle. Sometimes he’d ask them to prove their worth, which I think you can figure out.”

Ugh. She curls her lip in disgust and cracks her knuckles under her fingerless gloves. She’s not used to the way these clothes restrict her in some ways and provide additional freedom of movement in others, but she doesn’t need a lot of flexibility to punch a fool. “Okay, bring them to the office. I’ll make sure they know what they’re in for when they see me.”

“Of course, Donna.” Leslie bows and leaves the room. This is it. Tifa checks herself in the mirror, questioning literally every decision she’s made up to this point. This artifice. This ridiculous mob boss outfit. She misses her suspenders and tank top, her combat shorts. Like everything else in Sector 7, buried in rubble no doubt.

She leaves her double doors open and listens for the approach of these three mystery guests. These three hopeful recruits to something they have no idea about. They think they’re here to spend an evening with Don Corneo while Tifa’s interested in soldiers and spies.

She picks up the yellow flower that has still not begun to wilt. This precious reminder that is now all she has of the spiky-headed boy who came back into her life. She fits the stem into her hair and adjusts the collar on her shirt, straightens her purple waistcoat, and waits.

It doesn’t take long for these strangers to filter in, led by Leslie. She listens out of sight for them to be placed, and then takes another deep breath, psyching herself up. She knows how to talk, how to walk, how to act, and how to be hard. Some she learned through instruction, some through hard-won experience.

She lets the heels of her new ass-kicking boots click pointedly as she steps forward, four paces, so that she is framed in the doorway, before she turns to these people.

And everything goes to hell the moment she’s visible. A familiar, spunky voice says, “Whoa! Tifa?!”

Tifa’s head snaps to the voice, heart ready to burst out of her chest. It’s her. It’s Jessie. In a bright red dress with divided skirts and a lot of room for pockets. She looks unusual in something flashy, but Tifa can immediately tell these garments can be fought in. 

To Jessie’s left is--she almost laughs at the absurdity--Barret in a sailor’s outfit, white with blue trim, and form-fitting with a jaunty little sailor’s cap. He’s handsome, but currently lacking his gun-arm altogether, which makes him seem diminished somewhat. But it’s him. It’s her. 

There’s another girl with them, but Tifa doesn’t know her. Has no eyes for anyone but her friends. When they see her, they run to her. Her guards hold up guns at them, and Tifa has to yell at them to wait. A tense moment passes where Barret and Jessie stare uncomprehending at what’s happening.

“Everyone out,” she says. “Everyone but the new blood.”

“You sure, Donna Lockhart?” Leslie asks, hesitating. The other new soldiers in her little army hesitate, waiting for her confirmation.

“Now. Everyone. Out.”

Guns lower. Everyone but Jessie, Barret, and the new girl retreat. Tifa’s heart bursts with repressed grief and joy, and she lets it all out the moment the doors close and they’re alone. She pulls the two into a hug, and for a long time it’s just the three of them, standing in Barret’s oversized embrace. Their ridiculous outfits forgotten. Their shared misery at Platefall. Everything that could be wrong is shoved away, for these precious moments.

When she realizes that not everyone is lost. All hope isn’t dead. 

When she finally lets them go, she sniffs back tears and presses back from them. “What are you wearing?” she asks Barret.

“That pretty boy Andrea said I had to wear something that made me look good, strong, and above all, handsome.”

“That sounds like him. And you do.” Her eyes widen. “What about--”

“Marlene’s fine. So are Biggs and Wedge. Some of the other Sector 7 folks.”

“A whole lot more didn’t make it,” Jessie says. “Marle and Wymer did, but yeah. Buncha missing people.”

“I’m so sorry, Jessie. I couldn’t get free the night it happened. I knew about it, but I couldn’t do anything.”

Barret clenches his fist. “So that’s what his goons were snoopin’ around for? To hand us over to Shinra on a silver platter?”

Tifa nods. “I took care of him, though. For everything he’s done to so many people.” The hard look in her eyes throws them off, no doubt, but she can’t help how she feels. How she shows it now. She’s Donna Lockhart.

“No shit?” Barret asks. “I’m sorry you had to go through it. We got out here as soon as we could.”

“I know you did. I--” She swallows the lump in her throat. “I didn’t even look for you. I just assumed you didn’t make it because there was no time to warn anyone.” A new hope flourishes. “And Cloud? Did you ever connect with him?”

Barret and Jessie share a glance. Tifa looks between the two of them, shaking her head. “Really? You found his--his body?” She grips the chairback at her desk to hold herself steady. 

“Not so much us,” Jessie says, “but maybe Aerith can tell it better.”

Aerith. Tifa shoots a glance over at the woman doing her best to be a wallflower in this delicate moment, of friends reuniting. Her outfit is glamorous, not made for a warrior in hiding, or a suit of prestige. It’s a soft purple dress with a dark green shawl. Almost ceremonial rather than attractive. And, she notes, it seems to match Tifa’s colors. Which of the Trio chose this woman, she wonders?

“You saw Cloud?” she asks, stepping towards the stranger.

Aerith nods, then shakes her head. “Only briefly. He--well, he fell through my church.”

Church. Fell through a church. No one lives through that. And yet. “He’s a SOLDIER. He’s lived through worse.”

Aerith takes a tentative step forward. “I’m sorry, Tifa. He was dead when the Turks carried his body away.”

“Turks.” Tifa doesn’t understand, but latches on to that detail instead of contemplating the other part of what this girl said. “Why were Turks there?”

“It’s a long story, but they recognized a SOLDIER when they saw his eyes, and took his body when they left.”

So that’s it, then. Dead. Tifa’s found her friends, but the one who truly mattered, the one who made it all seem possible that they could come out the other side… he’s gone.

And Tifa feels strangely calm. She looks at this woman, this stranger, who intersected with their lives and came in contact with Cloud ever so briefly. And that connection was strong enough to send her searching for others. To find Barret, and Avalanche. And Tifa herself.

She sighs. “It’s good to meet you, Aerith.”

Tifa holds out a hand to Aerith, and Aerith goes to shake it, but something almost seems to push her forward, to throw her off balance. Tifa thinks she sees some kind of shadow in the moment Aerith falters, then the shadow is gone. Aerith trips and stumbles into Tifa, and Tifa catches her with an arm around the back, as of dancers performing a dip. Aerith blushes, and reaches up to the yellow flower in Tifa’s hair, plucks it free. Tifa reaches her free hand up to stop her from taking Cloud’s flower, and grips her hand between them.

Aerith says, “So you’re the girl Cloud gave the flower to. It’s a surprise and a pleasure to meet you, Tifa Lockhart, Donna of the Wall Market.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only took 8 chapters for Aerith and Tifa to meet! I'm so sorry, lol, it was supposed to happen sooner, but I'm a slow-burn jerk, apparently. 
> 
> Now that they've met, Tifa and Aerith get to know each other; Tifa gets on-the-job training as Donna Lockhart; and the girls agree to a favor for Tifa's lieutenant, Leslie.
> 
> Also side note: I know the Elemental materia doesn't work with the Poison materia in either the remake or the original, but I made an executive decision and went with it! Consider the Elemental materia as a combination of "Elemental" and "Added Effect" from the original game.


	9. Donna Lockhart meets the Carbuncle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tifa, AKA Donna Lockhart, having reconnected with her Avalanche companions, updates them on her plans as the boss of Wall Market, while getting to know this stranger, Aerith. 
> 
> Later, Leslie calls on Tifa to help him track down the former Don Corneo in the sewers, and they delve into the depths with Jessie and Aerith along for the ride.

After that unexpected reunion and even more unexpected moment of intimacy with Aerith, Donna Lockhart retires to what used to be the “entertaining” room for the Don’s castoffs. Jessie and Barret join her, and Aerith excuses herself to gather up Wedge. It will be good to see him, as well, and she hopes that Biggs can make his way over soon.

They take seats while one of Andrea’s people serves chilled drinks. Barret merely takes the bottle while Jessie and Tifa accept glasses. Once the servant departs, Tifa’s demeanor changes, relaxes. Barret and Jessie wear the clothing the Trio prepared for them, and Barret looks refined but wholly out of place in a military uniform, yet diminished without his gun-arm. Tifa knows that’s unfair. He’s ruthless and sufficient with or without.

“There’s a whole-ass story waiting to be told here,” Barret says, taking a big slug of wine, “and I don’t think there’s enough booze in the slums to do it justice.”

Tifa grimaces. “You’re not entirely wrong. But to answer the most obvious question: Don Corneo used his thugs to gather intel on a ‘man with a gun arm’. I learned from some of his people that Cloud took the first wave out while we were celebrating and preparing for the Sector 5 mission the night before.”

“Huh. Didn’t even know about that,” Jessie says. “I guess that explains why he looked a little put out when we went on our night ride.”

“Night ride?” Tifa asks. They swap stories, catch up, tell all the tales that need to be told. 

“This Roche guy that Cloud fought sounds intense,” Barret says. “I knew SOLDIER was tough; hell, I kinda thought Cloud was a little punk, honestly. Guess if you’re in SOLDIER, you’re for real, huh?”

Tifa shares her side of the story, and she’s surprised at her own calmness, her own detachment. She’s spent so much time since Platefall ignoring it all, pressing it away, that it almost seems like an event that happened to someone else. To a Tifa that died with the rest of her people in Sector 7. Donna Lockhart sips her wine as they talk and she outlines what she has in mind.

“Avalanche is dead, huh?” Barret says after she’s done. “We had gone a little rogue, I’ll admit. You have another name in mind for us?”

Tifa grins, a hard grin. A grin she isn’t used to giving, and yet it’s beginning to feel just right. The Donna is unrelenting and cruel in her quest for justice. For vengeance. 

She says, “I do. We’re still out to protect the planet, and the planet has other weapons. Instead of an Avalanche from without, we shall be the volcano that explodes from within, destroying them inside out. An Eruption.”

Silence covers them all and Donna Lockhart sips her wine in the quiet, letting her new demeanor soak into them. Barret was the leader of their little movement before, but now they’ll be a different kind of freedom force. Now they’ll infiltrate and destroy Shinra from within. For the planet. For Sector 7. For everyone who ever suffered under their rule.

“Damn, girl,” Barret says finally. “I ain’t really got anything else to say. Just damn.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Jessie says, holding her wine glass up and clinking it against Tifa’s and then against Barret’s bottle. 

“So tell me a little about this new girl,” Tifa says after they drink a little more. She has a fuzzy feeling in her gut and she isn’t sure if it’s the woman or the wine. 

“Carbuncle,” Jessie says, a little tipsy. “She just kinda came outta nowhere lugging Cloud’s pack and telling tall tales. Sorry,” she says, eyes widening at Tifa’s tightening fist on her wine glass. “We’ve had a week to live with it, but I guess it’s only been like half an hour for you.”

“You’re fine.” She idly runs a finger along the yellow Reunion flower that Aerith stuck back in her hair after their awkward meeting. Not Cloud’s flower, now. Even that has been taken from her. Aerith’s flower. The fuzzy feeling in her gut tightens and sours. This woman, who just fell in with all her people and had an entire adventure without her, without Cloud.

She says, “Really, it’s fine. Cloud and I were honestly barely more than acquaintances back in the day. Having him here was nice, but it wasn’t like we were childhood sweethearts.” That isn’t strictly true. But the ease with which she says it feels comforting. A comforting lie.

“Well, I miss him. That spiky head, the way he started to soften around us, his shoulders popping when he swung that sword.” Jessie hiccups a little and her face flushes more than just the wine would cause. “This is good wine.”

Tifa smiles. “Tonight we can drink as much as we want. Donna Lockhart is only a name to be feared by her enemies.”

Jessie finishes her glass and sets it aside, though. “Aerith came asking about another SOLDIER she knew once, what was his name, Barret?”

“Zack something.”

That name shoots a lightning bolt down Tifa’s spine and she sits ramrod straight, clutching at Barret’s flesh-and-blood arm. “Zack Fair?”

“Ow, yeah, damn, what the hell?” He pulls his arm free. “That sounds right. Don’t tell me you knew the guy somehow.”

She sits back. What are the odds? The other SOLDIER that came to Nibelheim all those years ago… the one she witnessed being cut down. Dead along with Sephiroth. She closes her eyes against the memories of her town burning. Of wondering where Cloud was at the end, if not there, holding up his end of the promise. Of that moment when she thought she did see him, as she lost consciousness. To be there for her. But he wasn’t. For years she thought about him, tried to look him up, figure out what happened to him, but it wasn’t until he appeared in the city that she allowed herself to think of him in terms of the boy she used to know. Of the man he had become. Of the promise he was intent on keeping, it turned out.

And yet.

A mystery.

Tifa sets her wine glass down. She needs to talk to Aerith some more, to find out how she knew Zack.

“I need a promise from you two. From all of the Avalanche crew,” she says.

Barret nods. “Sure, anything.”

“Go with this new persona. Don’t question me in front of the guards. I told you what I had to do to get at Don Corneo, but you don’t really know. They do. Some of them saw it firsthand. I need that to follow me like a shadow, do you understand?”

Jessie’s eyes well with tears, but she nods. “I don’t think you need to tell any of us twice--Donna Lockhart. But when we’re alone, can I still call you sis and hug you?”

Tifa smiles at that. Jessie’s so strong in all the ways one can see, and so very broken in the ways one can’t. She nods and Jessie pulls her into a hug that lasts a good long time, that breaks a little of that gangster veneer Tifa’s built up.

She clears her throat finally and Jessie lets her go. There’s a knock at the door, and Tifa reclines, holds her wine glass back up as if in the middle of a toast. “Enter!” she calls.

The doors open and Kotch lets Wedge and Aerith through. Wedge stares at Tifa with uncomprehending eyes and then says, “No way,” in that raspy voice. 

“Good to see you again, Wedge. Kotch, that will be all for the evening.”

“Yes, Donna. Um--” He hesitates, looking at all the faces that knew his new boss before, that would know he served Don Corneo willingly, that he was probably garbage worth tossing on the midden heap.

Tifa clears her throat. “Say what’s on your mind, Kotch.”

“It’s just--I know you’re friends of the boss,” Kotch says, primarily to Barret, who scoffs at him. Barret takes a parcel from Wedge and begins reattaching his gun-arm. Good to see something back to normal. “I want you all to know I didn’t like the Don, and I’m truly sorry about what happened to Sector 7.”

“Kotch,” Tifa says, and he shuts up. “You’ve proven yourself to me. You don’t have to convince them. Isn’t that right, Barret?”

Barret looks about to argue, then catches her face and nods. “If the boss vouches, we’re good. Kotch, right? You’re the guy singing our praises in the arena.”

“That’s right.” He swallows visibly and grins. “Hope I did you all justice.”

“You did all right,” Jessie says.

Kotch nods and takes his leave. Aerith sits down between Barret and Jessie, while Wedge can’t take his eyes off Tifa. 

“Wedge, man, chill,” Barret says, and Wedge catches himself. 

“Uh, sorry. It’s just--wow, Tifa. Carbuncle told me you were all mob-bossed up but I didn’t really know what to expect.”

Tifa smiles kindly. Poor Wedge is out of his depth here, but he’s a good man. Now Tifa needs to speak with Aerith, and she would prefer to do this part alone. “Now you know,” she says to Wedge. “I’ll have rooms prepared for you. It’s been a long day and a long night, and I’m sure you’re all tired. I heard about your exploits in the arena. Aeris the Carbuncle did things with materia no one had ever seen.”

Aerith blushes and grins. “It was Cloud’s materia. I just pointed it at the bad guys. And dogs. And houses.”

Houses. What strangeness had Tifa inherited with Chocobo Sam? “I’d like to hear more about your time with him,” Tifa says. “Would you care to join me for a drink on the balcony while I have Kotch settle the rest of you in?”

Aerith agrees, and the rest nod, Barret most of all seeming to sense that Tifa wants to have a private chat. “Yeah, I mean I did get stabbed by a little goblin thing. Could do with some rest. Maybe a little more of this booze.”

“I’ll have some sent to you.” Tifa stands, and everyone else does the same. She asked them all to pay deference and go along with the ruse, but it surprises her that they’re doing it now when no one who needs to see it is around. She really has changed, and they sense it. They know it. 

She’s Donna Lockhart now. The Tifa they knew died the night the plate fell, as surely as if she was in Sector 7.

She directs her soldiers and servants to lead away her friends, and holds a hand out to direct Aerith towards a different direction. “The view from the balcony is quite nice, I hear.”

“Haven’t checked it out yourself yet?” Aerith asks, stepping up beside her as Tifa falls in stride with the woman. 

“Leslie told me it’s where Corneo watched the--well, you know.”

“Can’t face it,” Aerith says, and Tifa glares at her. “I mean I don’t know if I could. I don’t know what I’d do if Sector 5 got destroyed. If my mother--” She falls silent, and they walk in an uncomfortable quiet, up a set of stairs to a third floor, and Tifa slides open the balcony door. Outside is one of Andrea’s recruited honeybees on sentry duty, and she nods at Tifa before departing. Tifa holds the door for Aerith, and the woman steps through.

Tifa slides the balcony door shut behind her, and hesitates. She’s afraid to turn and look. To see the devastation firsthand. She hates that she has this inside her. 

Aerith says, “I like the sky at night,” which distracts Tifa, and she almost hates the woman for being so glib. Tifa turns sharply at her words, and Aerith is pointing up at the hole where the upper plate of Sector 7 used to be. Used to be. Her fist tightens and her knuckles crack. 

Aerith keeps talking. “It’s like a blanket wrapping itself around us. Glittering with precious stones. It’s comforting, don’t you think?”

“I know what you’re doing,” Tifa says.

“What am I doing?”

Tifa strides up next to Aerith, sighs, and stares at the night sky. “What’s wrong with the sky during the day?” she asks instead of answering.

Aerith shrugs, as if warding herself from a cold wind. “It’s a lot of emptiness. I prefer a roof over my head, a flower in my garden, and a burbling stream reminding me that I’m tied to the planet. That we’re all tied to it.”

“Poetic,” Tifa says. “I admit I can’t really get the measure of you. You met Cloud, you randomly joined a freedom fighting group, and you came on a rescue mission when you don’t even know me.”

Aerith shrugs again, this time glancing at Tifa with a shy smile. “I follow my heart when my mind can’t decide.”

“And your heart led you to chase a dead man?”

“He was alive the first time,” Aerith says, and then bites back a hissed intake of breath. “Sorry, that probably makes me sound like a jerk.”

“You were interested in him from a chance meeting?” Tifa asks.

Aerith nods. “Those eyes, and that sword. And he was the first person to convince me I wasn’t crazy.”

“How’s that?”

Aerith’s head shakes. “He saw me and helped me without knowing what was after me, and that’s rare enough in this city.”

Tifa notes she didn’t explain, but lets that go. “And you gave him a flower.” Tifa runs a finger along the petals of the yellow flower in her hair. It should have begun wilting days ago.

“I did. You know, in some cultures it means--”

“Reunion,” Tifa finishes for her. “I don’t think Cloud knew that when he gave it to me.” She looks away from Aerith, away from these emotions, and up at the sky again. And slowly she drops her gaze to the wreckage, seen in shadow and silhouette, of her former home. Her grip tightens and tenses on the balcony railing, but she forces herself to look. To keep eyes open and let all that pain fuel her. To build that eruption.

Aerith’s fingers curl over Tifa’s, and Tifa freezes, denying her instinct to fight, to elbow this woman in the chest, steal her breath, drop her off the balcony. To be touched without permission after what Corneo planned to do… She yanks her hands away from the railing and Aerith gasps in surprise at the sudden, violent motion.

“Sorry, Tifa,” she says. That just won’t do. Not for a stranger.

“You can call me Donna Lockhart. Just because you’ve cozied up to my friends and made nice with Cloud, that doesn’t make us pals.”

Aerith’s eyes widen, with shock or hurt, maybe both. “No, of course not. I just thought--”

“Let’s talk about Zack Fair,” Tifa interrupts, and Aerith blinks rapidly against the pivot in conversation. It was unexpected, but not surprised?

Aerith says, “And here I thought I was going to have to ask you about him.”

“So you  _ were _ looking into Cloud because of Zack,” Tifa accuses. 

“I told Barret and the others as much.” Aerith leans against the balcony and sighs. “But they didn’t know him. So how do you?”

“Did.” There’s a certain amount of pleasure in this, Tifa thinks. An eye for an eye, or something. Aerith told Tifa about Cloud’s death, and unless she missed her mark with Aerith, Tifa just told Aerith about Zack’s death. 

“Officially he was declared dead a few years ago,” Aerith says. Tifa watches her, and there is a certain tightness in the lines of her face. A long held breath waiting to be released. What was Zack Fair to Aerith? “Do you know how it happened? There was never an official word from Shinra.”

Tifa takes a deep breath, flashes of fire glinting off the sharpest steel in her mind. “That’s not a story I’m ready to tell. Sephiroth killed him, though, on the mission that saw my hometown destroyed.” My friends and family murdered, she doesn’t say.

That tightness in the admittedly nice lines of Aerith’s face grows even more at mention of Sephiroth. “Oh. Him,” she says.

“Did you know the hero of legend as well? You get around, Carbuncle.”

Aerith’s face sours into a grimace. “If you want to be called Donna Lockhart, you can earn the privilege of calling me that.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

Aerith shakes her head no. “I never met him, but to hear Zack talk of the man, he was invincible. Immortal. A man above all others.”

“What was Zack to you?” Tifa asks.

“An overture from Shinra. A babysitter.”

“Something to do with why the Turks were at your church when Cloud fell through it?”

Aerith nods. “And now we reach the story  _ I’m _ not ready to talk about.”

Tifa chuckles slightly. “Fair enough. The way you say his name, I guess it wasn’t just a bodyguard for long.”

“No.” A secret smile spreads over Aerith’s lips, crinkling the corners of her eyes. Memories of a first love? Has to be. 

“You don’t seem heartbroken over the news,” Tifa says.

She shakes her head. “You could say I have a sense about these things. I said my goodbyes to him long ago.”

“Do you know what he was doing on a mission with Sephiroth when he was mostly babysitting you before that?”

Aerith shakes her head no, glancing back down to the ruins of Sector 7. “It was pretty abrupt, to be honest.”

So close to something resembling answers, to connecting dots that long desire to stay unmoored. Tifa sighs and says, “So, Aerith, you’re one of the rebels now.”

“So it would seem, Donna Lockhart.” 

“Your skill with Cloud’s materia is impressive, or so I hear.”

Aerith shakes her head dismissively. “I just have a sense about the essence contained inside.”

“Barret said you treat it like it has feelings.”

“Doesn’t it? It’s connected to the Planet, made of its purest form of energy. If all life springs from the Lifestream, is it so hard to believe that materia has a life of its own?”

Tifa doesn’t know how to answer that, but she does know something about the former Don’s treasures that piques her interest with this woman. “Would you wait here a moment?”

Aerith nods, unsure, and Tifa closes the balcony door behind her, summons one of her guards and has him return with a glowing red orb after a couple of minutes. She steps back outside and holds the materia up to Aerith, whose brilliant green eyes reflect the shadowed light of this precious item.

“Do you know what it means when it’s red?” she asks, and Aerith shakes her head, reaching a tentative hand out to the orb. Tifa holds it out to her and places it in her cupped palms, then holds the sides of her hands so they’re both cupping the materia. “The only note Corneo had was that it brought fortune and luck to those who possessed it, which sounds more like a sales pitch than anything real.”

“Can’t you feel it?” Aerith asks, and Tifa frowns. She doesn’t feel anything. “It has a presence. It’s so strong, I can’t believe you feel nothing.”

Aerith steps in closer, pulling their hands up between them, and manipulates the red orb and Tifa’s hands so that Tifa holds the orb and Aerith cups Tifa’s hands. Tifa doesn’t fight this intimate contact. She’s too curious. 

Aerith says, “Concentrate on the materia. Let it breathe into you as you breathe into it.”

“Like… actually breathe on it?” Tifa asks, confused. She had asked Cloud how to use materia, but they hadn’t had a chance to get into it before the Sector 5 Reactor mission.

Aerith grins and Tifa fights the rising red in her cheeks and neck. “I don’t know what’s metaphor and what’s literal with this stuff.”

Aerith says, “Just… breathe slowly. Feel the pulse of the magic. Feel it inside you.”

Tifa concentrates, tries to follow the directions of this very strange woman. This woman who is suddenly standing very close, whose eyes almost glow with anticipation, whose heartbeat Tifa can feel thumping through her hands cupping Tifa’s. And that’s when she feels it: a separate pulse emanating from the red materia, almost like a wave hello. Tifa gasps.

“You feel it now,” Aerith says, not a question.

“I feel--I feel  _ him _ .” It’s alive, this red materia. It’s even got a name. Tifa laughs. She can’t help it, and the tension of the moment breaks. “It feels a little like fate, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe it does,” Aerith says. “If you believe in that sort of thing.”

Tifa’s hands drop away, leaving the Carbuncle materia in Aerith the Carbuncle’s hands. “I suppose you might be crazy to think fate exists, because that means Sector 7 could never be saved.”

Aerith doesn’t respond to this. She holds the materia closer to her chest now, protectively. “Thank you for this. I’ll make good use of it.”

“For the resistance,” Tifa replies.

Aerith shakes her head no. “For Donna Lockhart.” And the impish grin says more than words ever could. Tifa excuses herself--leaving that smile on the balcony--and goes to her room. She’s frustrated, annoyed, and not a little bit flustered by Aerith and the way she looks at Tifa. The woman is a nuisance, who sees too much but knows too little. Who runs headlong into danger for people she barely knows. Who has connections to Tifa and her past through two different SOLDIERs.

And whose eyes ask for more than her lips will say. Why does Tifa’s heart beat so furiously inside her chest at the thought?

*****

Tifa is still distracted the next day, listening to Leslie’s reports on the day-to-day goings-on of the Wall Market. It takes him clearing his throat to gain her full attention, and she sits up in startlement, covering that she was clearly not listening with all her mind.

“You were saying, Leslie?” she asks.

He frowns. “I was saying that I think I’ve found the path through the sewer to Corneo’s hideout. The destruction from Platefall blocked off all the routes I knew about, and it’s taken a few days of clearing rubble, reinforcing old shortcuts, and what I think we can charitably call hands-on training for the honeybee recruits against the big rats and bats down there. But I think we have a viable path to find Corneo’s bolthole, to see if we can find him after all.”

Tifa sighs. She knew this day would come sooner or later, that Leslie calls in his favor for deciding to serve her. She had hoped it would be on a timeline of weeks, not days. But she made an agreement with him, and this mob boss keeps her word.

“Do you want more guards to investigate the place?” she asks.

He shakes his head no again. “If his big old pet is down there, I don’t think you want to send just anyone. Not unless you’re fine with starting over with several more new recruits.”

“You think they can’t handle one creature?” Tifa asks. She stands and paces, thinking about all that she could be doing instead of humoring Leslie, chasing a ghost she already killed. Planning her revenge against Shinra. Plotting to infiltrate and kill the Turks for their hand in Platefall. A flash of green eyes and a flick of long brown hair. 

Leslie continues, “I think you underestimate this thing. If it’s down there, it will fight and it will kill anyone who isn’t prepared. I’d suggest your old friends, especially the big guy, if you can spare them.”

Tifa scoffs. “I sent Barret and Wedge back to Sector 5 to coordinate with our other member. They’re likely to be gone a couple days.” She thinks about it. “Jessie would probably be fine to spare. She’s looking over Corneo’s maps and files, trying to find a way into Shinra. Blowing something up will be good for her, I’m sure.”

“What about the other one?” Leslie asks. “Aerith. Her materia use was something else. I’ve seen people use it in combat, but nothing like what she’s pulled off.”

Aerith. Tifa clears her throat. “She’s a bit dainty to go tromping through the muck.”

“And what about you, boss?” Leslie asks.

Tifa pauses in her pacing to glance at Leslie, who has the good sense to look down and scratch at the back of his head in embarrassment.

“No, I guess that would be ridiculous.”

“It’s not. I made a deal with you that I would help you when you had a lead. This is the lead and I’m not about to go back on my word. I need your knowledge more than I need your loyalty, but I hope to buy both.”

Leslie smiles. “Honesty is a good look on a mob boss. I’m not really much for fighting, but I can guide you down there.”

“Do I have anything scheduled for today?” Tifa asks.

“Just meetings with the Trio this afternoon. Daily business. Nothing we can’t push for a mission.”

Tifa nods. “It’s settled, then. Ask Jessie if she’s keen to use a grenade or three, and bring Aerith if you see her on the way.”

Leslie bows to Tifa. “Right away, Donna.” He leaves the room to find her compatriots, and Tifa heads into her personal room behind her office, activates the trap door that leads into the sewers, and changes into something that can get ruined. The waistcoat and breeches are a strong look, and she can fight if she needs to in them, but if she’s going into real danger, she needs her full freedom of movement.

So she puts on the training armaments she had procured from Andrea’s gym with its interesting clientele. A white tank top like her old outfit, but lined in a purple that matches her mob boss look. She slides on the forest green shorts and the combat boots, and hooks the suspenders into the new combat kilt she had Andrea design for her. It’s not exactly her old outfit, but it’ll do. 

She looks for a bangle among the Don’s belongings that has a materia slot. If Aerith comes along, maybe they’ll have time to test it. She slides the padded gauntlet up her non-dominant left arm, adjusts the gaudy gold bangle with its two materia slots she found tucked away in the Don’s jewelry box, and slides her fingers into her customized razor knuckles, retracting the blades for now.

Leslie knocks on her chamber doors and she opens them to reveal Jessie, Aerith, and himself. Aerith lugs Cloud’s pack with all its curatives and materia, and carries an ornate staff glowing with blue and green materia. She wears a simple pink dress with a fashionable leather jacket over it, some deep red coloring to offset the garish pink. Tifa recognizes the dress from the Don’s stockpile, some conquest of a night that he kept as a trophy. The disgusting man. She half hopes he’s alive so she can kill him again.

Jessie has fully reconnected with her old look, only instead of the red Neighborhood Watch / Avalanche colors, she has instead adopted the green and purple of Donna Lockhart. Of Eruption. Her new breastplate shines and she has a bandolier full of explosive pain to match the pistols holstered at her hips.

“Good to see you kitted out,” Tifa says, admiring them both. To Aerith she says, “We’re heading into a fight, most likely. Will the dress slow you down?”

Aerith shakes her head no. “I’ll be fine, Donna Lockhart. Someone has guns, and Jessie brought two pistols.” Tifa fights the flush of her face at that terrible compliment, and turns away towards the gaping hole in the floor.

“Well, just don’t slow us down if we get into trouble. Leslie, do we need anything else before we head in?”

“I don’t think so, boss.”

“Good. Jessie, want to do the honors of heading in first?”

Jessie grins and nods. “First in has the most fun, haven’t you heard?”

She doesn’t wait for the answer, though. She practically skips to the ladder and disappears down the hole, complaining of the smell the whole way. “What kind of idiot keeps a stinkhole in their bedroom?” is the last one Tifa hears before her voice fades away. How far down is this sewer?

“Me next,” Aerith says, but before she approaches the ladder, she reaches into Cloud’s pack and withdraws a green orb of materia, then cups her staff between her shoulder and neck so that it rests there. “I see your bangle can take materia. Do you want to try some?”

Tifa nods, and Aerith holds her free hand out to her. Tifa holds her bangle up, and Aerith grasps it, inserting the materia, where it almost seems to shrink down to fit. These armor bangles are so weird. Tifa goes to pull her wrist back and examine it, but Aerith holds the grip and tuts at her.

“Not yet.” She grabs her staff now and slides the blue materia out of it, and slots it into the other free slot in Tifa’s bangle. The blue and green glows meld together into a solid teal that casts its glow over the entire bangle, and Tifa immediately feels it doing… something.

“What is this?” she asks.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Aerith says, “But hey, we’ll find out! The green is fire and the blue kind of supports it? Makes it work passively. We’ll see when we get there.”

Not at all assured, Tifa smiles at the gesture and examines this magical addition to her kit. The brief lesson Aerith gave her the night before, on how to connect with materia, lets her feel the warmth from the fire orb, feel it waiting to activate. To spread and scorch. The blue one doesn’t feel like anything.

Aerith stands at the ladder, now, and mock salutes. She has a bangle on her right wrist as well, similar to the one Tifa wears, only silver instead of gaudy gold, but it glows a soft red from the Carbuncle materia she’s inserted into it. This day is going to be very interesting, Tifa thinks.

Aerith descends the ladder, and Leslie follows her down. Tifa takes one last breath of fresh air before following her people into the depths. Into a contract of loyalty and luck.

And she regrets it immediately. They all gag at first as they get to the bottom, as the permeating stench of old rot and waste surrounds them. Leslie’s throat lurches but he doesn’t throw up; Jessie is not so lucky, and her breakfast splatters the worn-smooth stone at her feet.

“Ugh, what a terrible thing humans are, to make this much bad smell and then put it all in one place,” she says, spitting and wiping her mouth.

“It’s not so bad,” Aerith says, and Tifa glares at her. Aerith grins, but Tifa can tell she’s struggling, the same as all of them.

Tifa glances around in the dim light from the flashlights Leslie passes out. More than the stench of people’s waste, this particular chamber has a wet skin closeness about it, which has faded somewhat but still keeps its musty aura. 

“This was where the Don’s pet lived?” Tifa asks.

“Yeah,” Leslie says, “But as you can see, there’s been something of a breach.” His flashlight arcs over to a large break in a wall, where light flickers from outside, the proper lighting of tunnels not properly maintained, let alone all the damage from a whole sector falling in on it. “Not sure if that happened during Platefall or after you threw the Don down here, but the beast is gone.”

It’s an impressive hole, and Tifa hopes that whatever this creature is, it doesn’t show back up looking for a fight. Leslie may not have been exaggerating its danger, after all.

“Well, only one thing to do in a situation like this,” Jessie says, “and that’s forge ahead. What are we looking for down here? I believe I was promised explosions.”

Tifa hides her chuckle, but Aerith does not. They approach the hole in the sewer wall with caution, and Leslie hangs back, directing from beside Tifa while Aerith and Jessie take point.

Jessie leads Aerith out, pistol drawn, and Tifa says, “If Corneo survived, he’s got a hideaway down here. Leslie’s looking for information only the Don had.”

“Or has,” he says.

“We think he’s still alive?” Aerith says, doubt in her eyes.

Tifa’s fists clench into knuckles and the blades pop out from the motion, as designed. Wicked razors that will help her end fights faster, when needed. “For his sake, he better not defy those odds.”

“You don’t get to be the mob boss of a place like the Wall Market if you’re easy to kill,” Jessie says. “Just saying.”

Aerith says, “I’m glad we’re all so sure the slimy snake is still… slithering around. The metaphor broke down pretty quick.” Tifa grimaces at the poor joke. 

The tunnels of the sewers have certainly seen better days. The lights flicker on and off, a constant struggle to remain in operation. Leslie leads them down several long tunnels: some they have to climb over debris, others they can walk through because of the previous clearing work her people did. There’s even a place where the channel gates malfunction and keep opening and closing, providing an endless rush of water that would sweep them off their feet if they tried to cross to the other side. Leslie leads them to a corner of this chamber, indicating that there’s a path through broken chunks of the wall, but they’ll have to crawl through some unsavory stuff, to proceed.

Tifa runs her flashlight across the rushing water and the gap between this side of the sewer walkway and the one they’re trying to get to. Debris--large, flat, and probably good for floating--sits in a pile, and Tifa has an idea.

“How long will that take to crawl through?” she asks.

Leslie considers. “Probably about ten minutes to get through, navigate the wreckage on the other side, and get across back to here.”

“Okay, what if we could stop the channel gate from malfunctioning?” Her flashlight lands on the controls on the other side of the rushing water. “It would either block the water and we could walk through, or it would open fully and fill up so we could use something to float across, right?”

“Yeah, but how are we getting over--”

Tifa doesn’t wait. She gauges the distance and sprints the few feet she has on this side, launching herself across the channel, landing smoothly on the other side as she jogs to a stop before colliding with the wall.

Aerith claps at the display, and Tifa dusts herself off. “Give me a moment,” she calls, feeling good that she gets to exercise her abilities.

She investigates the control console, but it’s sparking dangerously and she’s afraid to touch it. “I might not be able to do anything with this!” she yells back. Then she remembers that Cloud had materia that could make lightning. Lightning is power and this thing could be overloaded.

“Aerith, you have that lightning materia?”

“Sure, you want me to electrocute everyone?”

“I want you to hit this control mechanism and see if you can short it out.”

Aerith’s eyes squint and she says, “It’s kind of far away. You might want to back up.”

Tifa does as directed and nods to the group on the other side. Aerith holds a green orb out in her palm, directing it at the controls. A brilliant white flash with a crackling sizzle erupts from her hand, sparking out across the water and diffusing slightly as it grabs at everything in its path. But it strikes the console, and Tifa covers her eyes as the spark catches the console on fire, and it whirs up violently for a second as it overloads, and then falls still. The gate, in its half-open position, allows the water to equalize. 

Aerith nods at the job done, and Jessie claps her on the back in congratulations. Tifa waves her approval and watches what the water does. A useful woman, for certain.

The water, unfortunately, equalizes at about half the height of the channel. Wherever the water is supposed to go seems to be blocked up or broken, slowing its draining away. They could swim through the now-stagnant wastewater, or attempt to crawl onto the debris Tifa investigates now. 

Only they don’t have the chance for further discussion as some kind of angry burble sounds from the other side of the open gate, and several large aquatic monsters, like giant humanoid frogs with tridents, jettison into the open space, growling their burbling anger at the party.

“Heads up, time to fight!” Tifa calls. Her yell alerts the creatures to her all alone on her side of the channel, and she grins as they leap from the water to land all around her, backing her into a corner. She activates the razor knuckles and charges at the creatures while she’s dimly aware that Jessie and Aerith are mounting a ranged offense on the other side of the channel.

The one she charges at leaps backwards into the water, anticipating her movement, and she has to drop back from the other two lancing their tridents out at her. She deflects with her razor knuckles and twists away from the first, then bends back as the second one pierces the air where her chest was a fraction of a second ago. 

She grabs the trident and yanks, pulling the creature off-balance and lifting her back into a defensive stance, where she pistons out a kick at the creature’s knee, snapping the leg at an awkward angle. It drops, burbling out a pained cry, and she roundhouse kicks it into its companion before they can recover. Several more swarm out from under the gate, joining the action and the other one as it also leaps back up to engage. Two of them drop under the water, preparing to dive out, but suddenly the surface of the wastewater freezes over. Tifa glances at Aerith and the woman winks at her across the channel, then has to dance back as another of the creatures bounds up and shoots some kind of water jet from its mouth at the place she was just standing. 

Two others leap onto Jessie and Aerith’s side while Leslie retreats to safety, and another one hops out onto Tifa’s side, putting it at three creatures on each side. The third one on Tifa’s side is not holding a trident, but some kind of murky, moss-covered staff, and begins chanting in its burbling language. These are not people, but they’re also not mindless monsters. Something else, something corrupt.

But Tifa can’t hold back if she hopes to survive this.

The wizard frog gathers energies from the staff, and just like Aerith, an elemental force rockets from its body, a torrent of flame that Tifa can’t hope to dodge. She throws her arms across her face and waits for agony and death, but the flames gutter and die as they ripple across her. The bangle with the fire materia in it, with the teal coloring because of that other blue one, pulses gently. Tifa grins. Aerith made her fireproof, and the creature looks confused that he’s not halfway to roast human.

Tifa doesn’t give it a chance to try again. Across the channel, Jessie and Aerith fight back to back, swinging staff and shooting pistols. One of Jessie’s grenades goes off, knocking one of the creatures back into a wall to kill it. Tifa rushes at the wizard frog, punching so that the razor knuckles slice across its skin, shredding it and putting it out of commission. Green ichor splashes out and over her face, hot and righteous. Her left blades get caught in its ribcage and she lifts her leg up, piston kicking it off the blade and into the frozen water below. It cracks the thin skein of ice as it plummets into the water. The other two recover and charge at Tifa. 

In a moment of inspiration, she concentrates on her fire materia, the way Aerith taught her the night before. A small orb of fire ejects out of her palms, not enough to do any harm, and she curses under her breath as the creatures tackle her. One gets a grazing strike across the leg with a trident, biting painfully into her calf, while the other’s horrible breath washes over her face, trying to bite her. She roars angrily and kicks one off, tries to rake her razor knuckles across the face of the other, but it wisely shoves itself away from her, only to get a jolt of lightning in its backside from across the channel. It drops dead at Tifa’s feet.

Aerith gives Tifa a thumbs up and swings her staff at the last one on their side, bonking it across the back of the head as it charges at Jessie.

Tifa kicks off from the ground to a standing position, taking stock of her side. Only the one left, and it looks like it regrets its decision now. Well, Tifa thinks, should have thought about that before. She retracts the blades on her knuckles and pummels the creature, forcing it back. Left cross, right hook. The trident falls away and Tifa kicks it into the water. She knows this thing is out of the fight already, but she keeps it up. Each meaty thwack against the creature’s face or chest is one less hurt it can put on someone else someday. One less victim. 

No more victims, only the punished.

She rears back as the creature staggers, unable to put up a defense at all anymore. And she drives her fist so hard into its chest that she hears its ribs crack as it flies backwards, smashing into the wall. Tifa doesn’t stop, though. She cries out wordlessly as the momentum from her rocket punch carries her forward. She leaps at the creature, boot planting firmly into its stomach as it collides with the wall a second time on the way down. Dust and debris puff out around it as it drops, lays motionless.

She pants her victory, wipes sweat, and turns to see her companions watching in horror at the brutality. The remaining creatures in the water scatter. 

“No mercy,” she calls out. “Now how about you freeze this water again so you can get across?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The second half of the sewer adventure to come in a day or two! Tifa and Aerith may not be totally getting along, but they'll get there, eventually, right?


	10. Chasing Shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Donna Lockhart, Aerith, Jessie, and Leslie find their way to Don Corneo's secret sewer hideout, and everything goes wrong immediately.

Tifa waits for Aerith to comply, and after a few seconds, Aerith shakes herself out of her horrified expression and holds out her staff. The magic is slow to come this time, and Aerith visibly shakes. Maybe she’s not built for this after all. Tifa cleans herself up as best she can while she waits.

When Jessie, Aerith, and Leslie finally make it across, Tifa’s breathing has slowed to normal. “I bet we don’t run into any more trouble on the way,” she says. “These creatures tend to respond to strength.”

Jessie shakes her head. “Whatever you say, Donna Lockhart.” 

“I didn’t know you were capable of… that,” Aerith says.

“Now you do. Let’s get moving. Leslie?”

Leslie says nothing, and points to a pile of rubble. “If we can clear that a bit, the tunnels to Corneo’s hideout are just through there.”

“You could have said that while I was waiting over here.”

He hesitates. “I don’t presume to give the boss menial labor.”

Tifa grunts. “We’re all fighters down here. Even the waif.”

Aerith huffs in frustration. “Why does everyone keep calling me that?”

Jessie laughs. The tension from Tifa’s anger and violence has passed. She claps Aerith on the back jovially. “I’ll bet the boss means it just the same as the Madam. A compliment, right, Ti--Donna?”

Instead of answering, Tifa asks, “Aerith, a quick word while these two work on the wall?”

Aerith nods, unsure, and they walk a distance away. Tifa turns to her and holds up her bangle. “I’m sorry you don’t like my methods, but I do have to thank you. This completely stopped that fireball.”

Aerith frowns and forces a smile. Tifa doesn’t need the woman to like her, but she’s disappointed all the same. Aerith says, “To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what it would do. It’s not how I used it yesterday.”

“Well, it worked today. Cloud continues to help, doesn’t he?”

“Actually, we have the Raspberry to thank for the blue materia.” Aerith gestures at Jessie, who is arguing with Leslie over the pile of rubble, swinging a grenade around. Tifa grins. Everything looks like a demolition project when all you have are explosives.

“She’s quite the reliable girl. You two seem to have made fast friends,” Tifa says. She tries to mask the jealousy in her voice, but it comes out a little all the same.

Aerith shrugs. “She’s not really the ‘acquaintance’ type, is she? Every emotion cranked to max at all times.”

Tifa nods. “More or less. Can you show me how to do this fire thing? I tried it in the fight and it just fizzled.”

Aerith shakes her head. “You did better than Barret. Something’s wrong with his bracer, I think.” Tifa remembers Cloud trying to explain materia to him and nearly freezing his arm off. “It might just take some practice, but not when we’re in the middle of a desperate fight.”

“Desperate? We didn’t even get hurt.”

“Jessie’s got a scratch and I see some blood trickling down your leg. We need to handle these when we see them. Infection is almost certain in a sewer like this.” Aerith pulls another green orb from the satchel, holds it up to Tifa. “I can heal that, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t.” Instead of finding a place to sit down, Tifa merely extends her leg upwards, holds onto it with one hand, and balances on the other foot. Her leg sticks up at an unnatural angle, calf flexed and exposed so that Aerith can see it better, and the woman doesn’t even hide the gaze up and down Tifa’s body. Tifa doesn’t need a translator for that look: hungry appreciation. Not that dissimilar to the way that Don Corneo looked at her. Tifa clears her throat while Aerith stares, and then Aerith blushes slightly before setting to work on using the curative materia.

A tickling coolness extends out of Aerith’s fingers and into the cut. She has a vague sense that she’s felt this before, but can’t recall where. The wound seals up and Aerith wipes the drying blood away. Tifa stares at it for a moment, runs a finger along the scar tissue, where it is sensitive to the touch. Just like the real thing. “Huh. I kinda thought it wouldn’t leave a mark.”

“It can’t undo damage, only accelerate the healing process. And um, sorry for staring.”

Tifa lowers her leg slowly and shrugs. “My former line of work had me pretty immune to the lusty looks.” She crosses her arms in front of her chest and betrays no hint of a smile. “Not usually from the pretty girls, though.”

Aerith’s face reddens slightly. “Hmm. I won’t do it again, without permission.”

Tifa catches the way she says that. Mercurial and passionate. Disapproving of her methods, but appreciative of her looks. No wonder Cloud attracted her attention so quickly. She frowns at that thought and waves an arm over to where Jessie and Leslie have settled on some manner of dangerous plan.

“We should probably stop them from bringing the rest of the sewer down on us,” Tifa says.

Aerith nods. “You’re the boss, boss.” Why does “boss” sound like “honey” from this girl’s lips? And why doesn’t Tifa hate it despite how they’re barely getting along?

“Hold up,” Tifa says, “I see you planting explosive charges everywhere.”

Jessie grins as she stands up and wipes her hands clean of the muck from the ground. “Yep! Just about ready to cause some fireworks.”

“Isn’t this gonna collapse the tunnels even more?” Aerith asks. “I like my head head-shaped, and not pancake-shaped, thanks.”

Leslie groans. “That’s what I said!”

“You didn’t say it as fun as she did,” Jessie teases. Leslie scoffs and stalks away. Jessie cocks an eyebrow at him and shrugs. “Why don’t any of the men like it when I flirt?”

“Poor taste,” Aerith suggests. “Look at that hat.” Jessie giggles, but Tifa shakes her head.

“We’re down here to find a lead on his fiancee, one of the Don’s ‘brides’ from a while back.”

Jessie’s eyes widen and then turn sad. “Oh. Well now I’m just a jerk, huh?”

“Never a jerk, Jessie,” Tifa says, squeezing Jessie’s shoulder. “If you’re sure this won’t kill us all, go ahead and blow the charges once we get to safety.”

Jessie shrugs, eyes on Leslie standing as far from the explosive charges as he can get on this side of things. “There’s a lot of structural weakness I can’t account for, but if we go far enough back, we should be fine. Most of the damage is done, after all.”

Tifa nods, gestures for them all to retreat. The water is still frozen, and they cross back over, into the tunnel, and take cover. Jessie grins at them all, presses the detonator and all is lost in cacophony and debris for a few seconds. The sewer walls rumble but hold, and out of pure reaction, Tifa throws a quick hand out to steady Aerith when she nearly topples in surprise.

The woman gasps but smiles when she doesn’t fall over. She reaches a hand up to where Tifa grips her shoulder, and Tifa pulls her hand back quickly. Aerith covers the motion by dusting herself off and says, “I’ve been around way too many explosions this week.”

Jessie slaps her playfully on the back as the dust settles and the shifting stones subside. “Should have called me the Demolisher in the arena, huh?”

“No kidding.”

Leslie shakes his head at them all. “Is it safe to go out there?”

Tifa nods at them to investigate, and they discover a room that now has debris everywhere, breaking up the frozen water where it tumbled down. But the path Leslie described is open. The way forward. The end of this mission so that Tifa can go back to planning against Shinra.

“Let’s keep going,” she says, and they fall in, cross the water, and pick their way cautiously through the opening, careful not to touch the walls or disturb anything, lest they cause another collapse.

And once Jessie is on the other side, she laughs, a sprightly thing. “Check it out, boss.”

Tifa follows her gaze, seeing first the long tunnels, mostly unbroken and in full operation, extending both directions. At the end of this hall, a stylized cartoon dog with an army helmet grins at them from the wall. It’s old, scratched, faded.

Stamp.

“Was this an old Avalanche route?” Tifa asks, smiling. Stamp. A mean name to give to Cloud, but she admits it was apt. 

Jessie says, “Must have been. Wedge could tell us for certain, he was familiar with the other cells.”

“Probably hasn’t been since Corneo took over a few years ago,” Leslie says. 

Tifa shrugs. “Sounds like Corneo was flipping on Avalanche cells long before we came into the picture.”

Jessie nods. “No wonder we couldn’t make any progress with criminal undergrounds undermining us.”

“It was always an uphill battle,” Tifa says. “And now they’re far bolder than ever before.” Tifa keeps wondering if maybe they’ll find something about Don Corneo that makes him make sense or humanizes him, but all they keep finding is proof that he was irredeemable. Tifa finds herself hoping the spineless man is still alive so she can finish him off properly.

Aerith says, “If he’s still down here, somehow, he probably knows we’re coming, right?”

“Explosions tend to announce that, yeah,” Jessie says.

“Then we should hurry,” Tifa says, and Leslie leads them along the tunnels until they reach a small, unassuming blue door that looks like it was probably a service entrance at some point.

“I think this is it,” Leslie says. He tries the crossbar but the door doesn’t open. “Yeah, locked. Okay, I have keys. If he’s in here, he might let me approach him alone. If I can get some info out of him before whatever you do, that would be ideal.” He begins trying the keys on a large keyring. Administrators are the most dangerous person to have betray you, it turns out.

Tifa nods. Down the tunnel and around a corner is an alcove that looks like it was a small break area with an old vending machine, a table, and some folding chairs. All moldy and dusty from disuse. The tunnel continues on for a while beyond that until there is more wreckage farther on, blocking them. But there is another door at the far end, also locked. 

Tifa says, “Jessie, Aerith, situate yourselves down the hall. If he’s in there and he tries to run, you might be able to stop him. Do not give him any mercy. He deserves none of it.”

“I’ll kneecap him if I have to,” Jessie says grimly, and Aerith merely nods, lips pursed together in an unreadable expression that Tifa thinks might be disapproval. But fuck her if she thinks he’s worth keeping alive. 

“No mercy, Aerith,” she reiterates, and the woman turns away, waving a hand dismissively while her long braid whips behind her.

“I heard you the first time. He won’t get away,  _ Donna _ .” Tifa doesn’t like how Aerith says her title, but there’s no time to make an example. Not when Corneo might be alive.

The lock clicks as the other two women get into position. Leslie holds a finger to his lips for silence and eases the door open, steps inside, and closes the door behind him. Tifa has a desperately paranoid moment where she expects the door to lock, for Leslie’s true loyalty to show through, but after a couple of seconds, the door eases back open and he waves a hand through. Tifa comes in after him, and now he locks the door behind her. One less avenue for Corneo to run easily.

This is a small antechamber, packed to the stone roof with more draperies and crates, many of them Wutai in style. The Don was a hoarder even worse than Tifa thought. Another door on the other side of this small chamber is cracked open, light shining through it.

Leslie whispers, “I think he’s here. I don’t know how he lived through his pet or how he got here after the tunnels were collapsed, but I’ll be damned if I don’t think I hear him in there rummaging around.”

Tifa says, “You go in, you try to get him to trust you, and find out what you can. If it goes south, I’ll come in and subdue him.”

“Not kill him, right?”

“Not at first. We had a deal, and if he can tell you where your fiancee is, you deserve to know.” Tifa doesn’t have the heart to tell him that she’s pretty sure the former Don fed them to his “pet” down here.

Leslie nods. “Okay, I’m going in.”

He approaches the door and eases it open. Tifa stands on the other side of the door, hidden from view as he steps through and leaves it cracked open.

“Don Corneo?” he calls. “Are you here, Don? It’s Leslie. I finally got free and came to check on you.”

Tifa can see through the crack in the door that it’s a large space, probably designed as flooding overflow, but has been used recently to continue storing the Don’s ill-gotten treasures. Barrels and paintings, crates and clothing: a regular smorgasbord of expensive items litter the area. Leslie walks around some stacked-up crates, lost from her sight.

And then she hears a voice. That weasely, husky voice that sends chills down her spine and tenses up every muscle in her body starting with her fists.

“Leslie? My boy, it’s good to see you. It would have been better a week ago when the bitch tossed me down the chute.”

“I had to play the role or she’d have killed me, too, Don,” Leslie says. “But we’ve taken control of your mansion and have her strapped back down, guarded constantly.”

A delighted laugh comes from Don Corneo and he says, “Ohhhhoho, you don’t say? I told that silly little slum ditch I’d take care of her, and now I still get to. I was down here working out a way to get a message to Shinra, to let them know what had happened.”

Tifa wants to end this man. She can’t believe he lived through the choking and the fall. But she waits. Give Leslie time to learn where his fiancee is, if he can.

“Well, now you don’t have to. We’ve had to keep Scotch off her while we looked for you, but she’s there, and we can go back any time.”

There’s silence for a few seconds, and Tifa’s already tensed muscles practically vibrate as she waits to hear his response. Then Corneo says, “Did you come down here alone?”

“No, Don, your men are in the tunnel outside. I wasn’t sure what I’d find in here, so I left them outside in case it was bad.”

“Hm, yes, probably wise. I’m a little ripe and it wouldn’t do for them all to see me like this.”

“Don…” Leslie says, “Since I’ve found you, would it be fair to ask where my fiancee is? Where did you send her?”

Silence again for several seconds, and then Don Corneo grunts as a loud thud sounds from inside. Leslie cries out and another thud follows. Tifa doesn’t wait. She pulls the door open and rushes in, only to see Don Corneo--red robes tattered and stained--grin at her from another doorway on the far end of the chamber. His neck is bruised and swollen even a week later, but he’s alive and well. He points a big golden pistol at her and fires.

Tifa throws herself to safety behind a crate as the bullet spangs off the stone behind her while the door slams. Tifa moves to chase, but more bullets come flying through the metal door, peppering everywhere around Tifa’s cover. She holds off, hating to trust Aerith and Jessie with capturing him, but she can’t give chase if he’s waiting to shoot her. That reckless maneuver worked once, but she’s pretty sure he won’t miss a second time if he’s got time to aim the gun at her.

The shooting stops and Tifa stands, ready to sprint again, but a loud roar and rumble throws her off-balance. She follows the sound into the upper reaches of this chamber, and screams as a shadow descends.

*****

Aerith stands at the ready outside the second door they found, staff held in front of her defensively, waiting for something to happen. She’s angry at herself for how she feels about Tifa despite seeing how violent Tifa’s willing to be. Unnecessarily brutal. If Don Corneo is alive, she’s pretty sure Tifa is going to cremate him while he’s alive, and Aerith can’t stomach that.

A shout, gunfire, and Aerith’s adrenaline spikes instantly. She holds the staff up high as she hears shuffling on the other side of the door, and prepares to swing. The door bursts open and a shabby, smelly man barrels out of the room and into her before she can react. Their eyes meet for the briefest moment as his go from panic to lust and back to panic. Aerith falls backwards, and he rips the staff from her grasp, then turns and darts down the tunnel. Towards Jessie.

Aerith scrambles to her feet, rubbing her backside as she gives chase. This has to be Corneo, doesn’t it? Suddenly all her misgivings about Tifa and what she intends to do to him are gone. He can’t get away, because that would upset Tifa, and she wants nothing more than to keep Tifa happy. 

He makes it past the break area, then rounds the corner and vanishes from sight. More gunfire ensues, most likely Jessie and Corneo standing off. Aerith, without her staff and unwilling to use the elemental materia at her disposal just yet, rushes forward. She grabs the first thing she sees from the break area and keeps running, checks the corner where Corneo disappeared, and finds him huddled behind a small alcove, firing blindly towards Jessie, who fires back.

Jessie clocks Aerith at the corner, and stops firing. Aerith runs forward as Corneo is distracted by the ceasefire, peeking out to see if he killed Jessie. Aerith yells, “Hey asshole!” and swings the folding chair over her head, driving it into his face as he turns with wide, panicked eyes. She’s not a soldier, but she knows never to leave an enemy at her back. Which means Corneo must have decided she was too scrawny to be a problem. Serves him right.

He collapses to the ground, gun and staff clattering harmlessly away. Aerith pants and drops the chair on his unconscious, slumped form on the ground, giving a thumbs up to Jessie.

But before they can celebrate their victory, Tifa cries out from the other room, while a horrific roar shakes all the stone and pierces their ears painfully. Jessie waves to Aerith and Aerith scoops up her staff, kicks Don Corneo in the side for good measure, and joins Jessie rushing to help Tifa.

Hopefully Don Corneo stays knocked out long enough for them to come back and secure him.

Jessie hits the door, where it doesn’t budge. “Oh, shit, they locked it behind them. Cover your ears.”

Aerith does as directed as Jessie points her pistol at the locking mechanism, then fires several times to break it open. It releases its lock and they rush inside, through a smaller chamber chock full of boxes and draperies, and gasp at what they find at the other door.

Tifa is at the center of a large chamber while a giant bluish-green monster, ragged skin and pig face, smashes fists larger than her against the ground. Tifa dodges left and right, avoiding the strikes, but there are giant metal shackles with loose chains arounds its massive wrists, and he swings these at her, knocking her back dangerously close to the edge of the room, where it drops off into rushing water.

With a brief second to react, Aerith rushes to Tifa and stops her from pinwheeling backwards any farther, while Jessie grabs Leslie’s unconscious body and drags him to safety out of the room. Tifa spares a quick glance for Aerith, nods her thanks, and they stand side-by-side ready for whatever the beast does next. The creature rears back, its horns glowing an ominous white, while its tail with a spiked end like a morning star swings about wildly, knocking crates and clothing all over the place. 

One of the large crates slides over to the door Jessie just pulled Leslie through, blocking it off. Another flies over to the edge, crashing into pieces against the wall before tumbling into the rushing water. Several smaller creatures dart out of the water at this disturbance, little lizard pig things like the big one in front of them, only about a third the size of the women. The creature’s spawn? They hiss and snarl and run around, picking up broken boards and shrapnel from the room to wield as weapons before rushing forward. 

“Deal with the little ones!” Tifa whispers as she charges back at the monster. The beast swipes a giant fist and Tifa leaps over it, uses it as a platform to leap higher and roundhouse kick the creature’s face, which spins it in place while Tifa lands underneath it, rolls back up into an offensive posture, and slides her razor knuckles out before tearing into the creature’s leg. It roars and kicks out, then leaps backwards, one leg shredded and weeping a dark, ugly blood. 

Aerith dodges away from one of the little ones, then swings her staff out at it, knocking it into the water while another leaps at her back, biting at her neck. She cries out from the teeth sinking into the flesh of her neck and shoulder, and bats the creature with her staff as best she can while getting an eye on the rest of the little monsters closing in. The creature falls from her back after a well-placed thwack, and she nearly drops in relief. With no time to recover or react, Aerith watches Tifa duck under a massive tail swipe, barely avoiding the wicked spikes before the big beast rears back and swings a giant fist at her. Tifa throws up her hands to block, but there’s no blocking this creature’s strikes. She goes flying backwards, twists in the air and slides into a crouched landing, her razor knuckles sparking off the stone as she stops and clutches at her forearms with anger and agony in her nearly-red eyes. 

Aerith concentrates on her materia, raises her staff, and jolts of lightning arc out towards three of the little ones. The first one squeals as it simply falls over dead with the scent of ozone and scorched pig flesh, while the other two leap to safety. The one she knocked into the water leaps back out, going for her throat, but she ducks and kicks at the creature as it lands. Her kicks aren’t as powerful as Tifa’s by a long stretch, but she manages to throttle it and knock it into one of the others that her lightning missed.

The big monster drops into a crouch, while its horns glow and it prepares to charge. Aerith yells, “Look out!” but the beast isn’t paying attention to Tifa anymore. Not after Aerith murdered one of its children. Tifa curses and sprints, but the big beast takes one large leap forward as it charges at Aerith. She is not expecting this massive beast to move so quickly, and she doesn’t have time to jump out of the way or try to stagger it with magic. She holds up her staff in a futile, warding gesture as it bears down, horns ready to impale her. 

And just as it is about to skewer her, Tifa’s feet smash into the beast’s head, throwing it off just enough that Aerith jumps free, and uses that moment to try and poison the beast, to slow it down and give them an edge like the Hell House fight. But the green, noxious materia wafts over the beast without effect, and it merely shakes its head of dizziness while Tifa and Aerith back up together.

“This isn’t going super great,” Aerith says while Tifa punches a little beast away without much effort.

“It was supposed to be focused on me!” Tifa hisses. “I could have dodged that charge.”

Aerith shrugs. “Sure you could. I don’t like seeing people turned into hood ornaments, though. What’s the plan now?”

Tifa laughs at the hood ornaments comment despite the seriousness of their situation, and then her face goes grim and serious again. “Maybe you should run.”

“Like hell!”

“Find Jessie and I’ll finish this.” Aerith opens her mouth to argue, but the beast recovers and roars again, a piercing rumble that takes Aerith and Tifa to their knees clutching their ears. And then… something else happens. The rumble continues after its roar fades, and the creature’s horns pulse and glow brighter. 

The small beasts scatter and dive back into the water, while the big monster leaps up to a side channel, and Aerith would swear it’s laughing the way its throat ululates. The rumble grows stronger, and then suddenly geysers of sewer water come gushing out of pipes high in the walls, flooding the room with fast-rushing waves. 

“Not fair, he controls water, too!” Aerith yells over the rushing torrents. The two women stand back-to-back, not sure what to do, but Tifa grabs Aerith by her wounded shoulder, yanking her backwards.

Aerith cries out in pain, but there’s no time for anything else. Tifa yells, “Jump when I say jump!” as they run for one of the last remaining crates in the room. Aerith can’t do anything but nod, winded and hurt.

Tifa sprints ahead slightly and yells “Jump!” as they near the crate, which is taller than the two of them combined, and Aerith sees Tifa’s eyes, hard but resolute. Sees her hands planted to boost her. Aerith chooses to trust Tifa in that moment, and she leaps.

Tifa’s hands move faster than Aerith can even see, and she locks her knees as Tifa boosts her into the air, jumping again off Tifa’s hands for maximum upwards momentum. Aerith flies up, weightless and flailing, hair streaming out behind her as she screams and lands roughly on the top of the crate just as the rushing water slams into the wood and sends it spinning. Aerith nearly loses her hold on the crate while it careers towards the water, and the geysers continue to shoot water everywhere.

“Tifa!” Aerith yells, not knowing what happened to the woman who just rescued her. Then a loud  _ k’thunk _ sounds from behind her and she glances back to see Tifa’s head pop up above the edge of the crate, grinning. One of her razor knuckles is dug into the side of the crate, and she rides the side while it spins and smashes into a wall. This crate is sturdier than the others, and it doesn’t splinter and fall apart, only cracks a little. Aerith loses her balance and collides with the stone wall, nearly falling off the crate, but she struggles to her feet and yells, “Get clear of the water!”

She holds her staff high, concentrating on the materia inside, and prays for that surge of extra strength she’s been able to call on before. While Tifa vaults over the side of the crate to stand beside Aerith, lightning ripples and arcs along the staff before it fires out in all directions, a web of deadly electricity, scattering out across the room and all the rushing water.

Screams echo over the geysers as Aerith channels the pure energy of the planet through this materia. She realizes she’s screaming, but she’s not alone. The wails of the little beasts join her in a terrible chorus as they’re all electrocuted. They jitter and seize on the surface of the water while the geysers subside, and the water slowly lowers as it drains away.

Aerith’s channeled lightning slows to a trickle, and her legs weaken as she drops. Tifa catches her, though, steadies her. Holds her upright and smiles that vicious smile.

“You’ve done it now, the mother’s pissed,” she says, pointing up at the enraged monster yelling in some guttural tongue while the water slowly lowers around them.

“Yeah, well,” Aerith says, panting, “I didn’t know it was bring your kids to work day.”

Tifa snorts laughter, but their moment of levity doesn’t last long. With the lightning and the water gone, the beast beats its fists against its chest and roars.

“Time to move,” Tifa says, lifting Aerith with a little effort into a princess carry. Aerith is too weak to protest or fight it--if she even wanted to--and she merely clings to Tifa with a rush of heat to her face as the fighter hops from the crate at the same moment the beast leaps back down, coming down on top of the crate as Tifa and Aerith land safely a few feet away. The crate shatters into pieces, gold and silver objects flinging every which way from inside it. The only object that remains unbroken in this chamber is the crate that blocks off Jessie and Leslie. Too bad the rushing water didn’t dislodge it.

Tifa whispers, “Stand behind me, if you can. I’ll keep it occupied.” She releases Aerith, and Aerith tries to stand on her own as Tifa moves away to put distance between them. The sudden absence of Tifa nearby, close and warm, pressed against her, drives Aerith’s fatigue deeper. She manages, barely, to hold herself upright. The only thing standing between her and a grim fate at this moment is an angry mob boss hellbent on vengeance, and Aerith suddenly likes her chances.

The red materia pulses and glows in Aerith’s bangle. She doesn’t know if she can manage anything else at this moment, but if she can help, she will. She concentrates on the Carbuncle materia, willing it to come out, to protect Tifa. To do whatever it is that it does, if only it will save this woman in front of her. This nightmare of anger who chooses to protect others.

A little white creature spins out of the bangle, cute and furry like some kind of fox, but with a shining red jewel in its large forehead. It lands next to Aerith, twists and coils around her legs like a cat. Aerith collapses to her knees as this little creature, this Carbuncle, radiates out magic. It pulses and tingles with a slight red glow.

The monster recovers from its leap and spins to find Aerith. Its tail flails wildly as it charges at her. It swipes at Tifa as it comes, trying to simply knock her from the path, but Tifa stands her ground. She plants her feet into a defensive posture, and rears back with her razor knuckle for one momentous punch. And that would be futile against such a monster, if not for the energy that radiates out of the little fox. Tifa’s punch connects with the creature’s chest as it barrels over her, shoving her back. The collision almost sends out shockwaves. The energy radiating out of Carbuncle rebuffs that momentum, fills Tifa with renewed vigor, and lets her stop the beast in its tracks in one massive, skidding halt. Its chest bleeds with a surface wound from the blades still sticking out of its muscle, broken off from Tifa’s knuckles.

It roars its frustration and rears back to pummel Tifa with its giant fists, but Tifa doesn’t wait. She crouches down, unknowingly empowered by the light of this Carbuncle, and launches upward with her other razored fist held high. This bladed uppercut connects with the beast under its chin, and explodes with renewed force. Both the beast and Tifa launch higher, harder, propelled by the augmentation of this little fox beast Aerith summoned. The monster smashes against the ceiling of this chamber, its horns shattering on impact, Tifa’s fist driving deep into the creature’s soft neck and up into its brain.

It is dead before it falls, but fall it does. Tifa kicks off the beast and lands in a crouch with mere moments before it will follow. Her impact cracks the stone, but the Carbuncle energy radiates off of her, protecting her. She leaps for Aerith in the split second before the beast collides with the ground, and they roll to safety while it topples and slumps to the ground, cracks the stone underneath, debris from the ceiling raining down all around them.

And for the space of a breath, all is calm, all is quiet. Aerith heaves exhausted breath, staring into Tifa’s amazed eyes. Then an explosion rips out of the last remaining crate, sending more shards of wood and decorative Wutai furniture flying.

Aerith and Tifa cover each other while the debris rains down. Aerith’s body is on top of Tifa’s, and they can’t do much more than shelter and wait for it to stop.

When it’s over, Aerith glances around. Jessie comes running out of the room, gun drawn, grenade at the ready. She stops dead in her tracks when she sees the dead beast and the rubble, the little bodies of the floating creatures scattered around, and the absolute wreck of the room.

“All okay?” Jessie asks, coming over to the pair of them. 

Tifa says, “I’ll live if Carbuncle here gets off me.” Aerith blushes as she realizes they’re chest to chest, and rolls off the woman.

Soot, sweat, blood, and gore cover both women, but they’re alive. Aerith says, “I guess you’ve earned the right to call me that.”

“You used the Carbuncle materia, didn’t you?” Tifa asks.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You punched that monster into the ceiling all by yourself.” She grins, though, and Tifa smiles back. Aerith looks around the room for the little fox, but it appears to have done its duty and fled. The red materia glows dully, spent, from within her silver bangle. Will it come back over time? She has no idea. She whispers thanks to it all the same.

“This is a hell of a scene,” Jessie says, surveying the wreckage and the dead animal. “And phew, this guy reeks.” Despite that, Jessie climbs on top of the beast and looks around. “Sorry I missed it, must have been a hell of a fight.”

“Next time, I’ll go for the unconscious dude,” Aerith says, then gasps. “Did Corneo--”

“Gone by the time I got Leslie situated. Leslie’s okay, but Corneo got away. Sorry about that.”

Tifa sighs, but shakes her head and says, “We had more pressing matters.”

Aerith stands up and begins wringing water from her dress. Though they avoided the worst of the torrential geysers, the stone floor is soaked. Her whole body aches, and the wounds in her neck and shoulder cry for attention, but she couldn’t do anything about it immediately anyway, as weak as she is. 

She says, “I hit him really hard, but I guess all that padding around his brain must be good for something after all.”

Tifa grimaces as she gets to her feet and likewise cleans up a bit. Aerith doesn’t know Tifa well yet, but there’s more than anger in her eyes right now. There’s fear crying for attention, but Tifa shoves it away, shakes her head and sighs. 

“We’ll get him next time, I’m sure. For right now, we should wake Leslie up and see if we can find anything in the other rooms that might indicate where Corneo put his past conquests.”

Aerith nods, but a sudden cracking noise from above catches all their attentions. The ceiling rumbles where the great beast’s horns cracked loose and small stones shake free, before the whole thing begins to tumble.

Aerith yells, “Jessie, it’s coming down!” but when Jessie goes to leap off the great beast, those damnable shadows swarm up out of the ground, buffeting her. Why are they here, suddenly? Helping or hurting, but always causing problems. Jessie falls backwards and out of sight behind the monster as the stones tumble and batter the creature and the surrounding stone. The shadowy wraiths vanish into the ceiling as it tumbles, and the ground cracks greater than before. The whole chamber starts to collapse from the center outwards. Tifa runs forward to save her friend, but Aerith grabs her wrist and pulls her back just before another ceiling stone drops and splinters more of the ground where Tifa was running. They have no choice but to retreat as a hole opens up in the chamber, swallowing the debris, the beast, and Jessie. Water trickles over the edges of this new pit into darkness while Tifa shoves Aerith away, running to the edge of the hole and peering down. 

“Jessie! Can you hear me?” Tifa yells, but there is no answer. Only the hardscrabble sound of rocks tumbling and sliding to a stop in a dark distance down below. Aerith joins Tifa at the edge of the pit, wondering if Jessie could possibly have survived that.

“Did you see that?” Tifa asks. “What were those black things that came out of the ground?”

Aerith’s heart seizes, her chest tightens. “Y-you saw them, too?”

“Hell yes, I saw them! What are they?”

Aerith shakes her head. A curious feeling grips her. There’s not just darkness in that pit, but some kind of soft light from below. The longer Aerith stares at the light within the darkness, the more she feels the urgency of it. It needs something, that darkness. It calls to Aerith with fear and pain. And she’s afraid she must go down into that pit, lest the shadow creatures force her into it anyway.

“We have to go down there,” Aerith says.

“Obviously, we’re going to find Jessie.” Tifa casts around for something that will help them get into the pit, to get to the bottom of it, however deep it is.

“There’s something else,” Aerith says. “I don’t know if Jessie survived that, but I have to go down there no matter what.”

“What are you babbling about, Aerith? Our friend just fell into a pit, and we are going to find her.”

“Yes, that, too.”

“Not ‘too’. I am not losing anyone else, do you understand me?” Tifa grips Aerith by the jacket lapels and pulls her in, stares into her eyes. Tifa’s eyes are angry, desperate, and above all, terrified. Aerith nods.

“We’ll find her, Tifa. We will.” And, she thinks, we’ll find the other thing calling to her. 

She’s so distracted by this that she hardly notices Tifa didn’t take exception to being called by her regular name and not “Donna Lockhart” like she has insisted upon.

Deeper into the earth will they go, to find Jessie and the source of this darkness tugging at Aerith’s very essence. Something terrible has gone on down there. Something only Aerith can correct. Only an Ancient. Only the Cetra.

**Author's Note:**

> Updates whenever I have time to get new chapters written!
> 
> You can follow me on Twitter @rick_cook_jr https://twitter.com/rick_cook_jr for updates and noisome fanfare about the ships I like.


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